Smoothing out Apple’s cloud.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Well, I’m glad that I didn’t drink the particular flavor of Kool-Aid that is the online cloud of services that used to be overpriced when they were called ‘.mac’, and seem still overpriced (and we have serverspace already, thanks) as MobileMe.
I’e consumed vast uncounted gallons of the many other brands of Apple Kool-Aid, anyway.
I applaud what Apple was trying to do…and there’s certainly a market out there for people who need what MobileMe was supposed to do.
But as you may have heard or read in various distorted ways in the mass media, MobileMe has had its problems…and maybe the best thing Steve Jobs could do is admit those problems, and maybe shuffle some folks around and hope for the best.
Well, ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng is reporting that he has done just that:
“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” [Jobs] says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.” […] “The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
Well. Yep. Indeed.
And I’m rooting for you, Steve…good luck with the pressing on.
Oh, and by the way…if you’re running Leopard and have a Google account, take a look at Google Calendar‘s free offering which now features complete CalDAV support…which means that you can edit your calendar on a web page, your phone, your iCal app…every darn where. If I had actual places to be and real things to do, this would be hugely useful.
And also in the meantime, I’m admiring our fine first-generation iPhone with the latest 2.01 software (just out today), and this fine phone has been all we wanted it to be and more. It’s just an amazing device, and Apple should be as proud of it (and its 2.0x software) as they are ashamed of MobileMe 1.0.
And in one more parenthetical, I have one word for a fine non-game (yet game-ish) app to load for free on your iPhone or iPod Touch: Bubbles. I can now be distracted like a toddler by bright shiny objects…on my phone!
Unkept incidences.
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
Jane Espenson is a writer and producer on some of my favorite television work of the recent years. She’s done her Fireflys and her Battlestar Galacticas and even her Buffys. And she blogged a bit yesterday about something that, as a caring consumer (and sometimes producer) of the English language, absolutely annoys the heck out of me:
Sir, you mean “unkempt,” not “unkept”. “Whirlwind,” not “worldwind.” You might mean “incidents,” or you might mean “instances,” but you certainly do not mean “incidences.” And, Miss, you must mean “hot on the heels of,” not “hot OFF the heels of.”
And just as I was reading and nodding and feeling all superior over folks who write “for all intensive purposes” and suchlike, she wisely adds:
The only thing wrong with feeling superior about knowing how to use these words is that each of us has a matching supply of words we’re using wrong without even knowing it.
I’ll take her at her word, although I’m not sure where I’ve misplaced my matching supply. I think these kinds of usage errors are a fine indicator of a culture brought up kinda sorta listening to television and hearing-but-not-quite-hearing phrases tossed out…and not bothering to figure out just what was said.
When you pick this stuff up for the first time in, say, a book, the phrase is right there in black and white. But then you may not know how it’s pronounced…until you hear a character in a movie or on TV show say it out loud. (And even then, you may not be getting it just right.)
Her blog, by the way, is a regular in my big ol RSS feed, a consistently entertaining window into the modern world of toiling in television writing.
This is Don Lennox, with the…
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Sometimes, I just look at an ancient piece of TV I did with 25-year-old technology, and I say to myself, wow, if I could redo all of that in crisp, clean high-res vectors now…
Brap-brap-brap! Kiribati! Islamabad! Nashville! Decatur! The earth! The universe! The news channel. Oh by the way, the original kinda survives on this fine YouTube video.
Rooting for cane sugar.
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Growing up in a sixties Ohio white bread environment doesn’t do a lot to provide you with an understanding of what food is good for you (after all, they test-marketed Pringles where I lived) and, well, besides, good information on nutrition seems to have evolved at about the same rate as the commercial food industry has taken mass-market food down a path toward high-fructose artificiality.
But after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma a couple of years ago, my growing concerns about the evils of high fructose corn syrup—in terms of what it does nutritionally, what it does ecologically, and well, it just doesn’t taste that good—reached enough of a threat level that I steer clear of it as much as possible…in everything.
So even my longtime favorites like Heinz Ketchup (for example) have given way to Trader Joe’s Organic Ketchup—not for any huge desire for organicness as much as to get back to a better-tasting cane sugar flavored product.
And the last time a huge tree hit the house, I was regularly buying IBC Root Beer—but I now try and make sure any rooty goodness is sweetened the old fashioned way. Yeah, internally, I know it is better for me…but I think I’m really doing it for the taste. Last summer, I enjoyed an old central Ohio favorite, Frostop Root Beer, while in upper Michigan…but it has that HFCS stuff, but I’m not so much of an absolutist that I didn’t give it a try—and I enjoyed it. So I drink it up there, but I deduct points.
You know, those mythical “points.”
So I was delighted today to see a six-pack of Abita Root Beer at a grocery store down off of Caroline Street, and I’m here to tell you, it is darned tasty on a summer’s morning. In a recent New York Times piece rating root beers, it came in third…right behind my old favorite IBC and its HFCS sweetening. Would IBC and Frostop taste better if they switched (or switched back to) to cane sugar? I sure think so. Will they do it just because I ask politely? Mmm, probably not.
We shall simply explain.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
From time to time I get asked to beta-test new versions of software, and of course there’s just the common experience of taking a new online service out for a spin. That’s when I’ll discover something, not necessarily something you’d label a “bug,” not really a “feature,” but a way the thing works that just doesn’t work for me, the real-world user.
I figure if I mention it to the developer, and explain what I was trying to do and why this is frustrating to me, I not only help myself to get an application or web service that works better down the road, but I’m making the lives of everyone else who uses the software easier as well. This might not always be the case—I’m not always Joe Everyman when it comes to how I use my computer—but I try to raise my hand and point out what I see as a problem, as opposed to grumbling to myself or to folks who have no influence on how the product actually works.
It’s amazing how many times in the Mac community this really works well…they appreciate the observation, they’re motivated to make stuff that sets new standards in user interface, they get it.
But lately, I’ve come up a bit against an attitude from software developers that calls to mind an experience when I was doing graphic design for a new twenty-four hour news channel in Austin…which was using some custom software for newsroom automation that was so unfinished at the point of purchase that it required a large team of developers from Germany to come out and live onsite for what seemed like weeks, months.
And at one point as we were trying to make this software work, we came up against a huge slowdown at the very start of the process…when a user dashing to a workstation in a newsroom, under deadline pressure, would log in and enter his or her password, the system would seemingly stop and wait upwards of 30 seconds until the login was accepted.
30 seconds is an eternity in newsroom terms. When this fact was presented to the developers (“hey, this might be a concern”), the unconcerned development lead said officiously—a quote I will always remember—”well, we shall simply explain [to everyone] why it must be this way.”
Um, yeah, that will help.
After the head of the local news group simply explained how quickly they could be sent packing, the software guys tackled the bug with extreme priority, and darned if they didn’t get the login time down to one second.
But that “we shall simply explain” attitude, well, I’m butting up against it in a couple of places lately. (And there’s its governmental cousin, popular in the Bush administration: “People just have to understand that…” —but that’s another story, another annoyance.)
There’s an otherwise great FTP/SFTP client—Cyberduck—which came out with a major revision that took away a key piece of functionality—having all the sites available in a drawer off to the side of the window, always there with one click. When I (and a handful of others) pointed out that this effectively hobbled our workflow, requiring multiple clicks to get where we used to take one. The change also eliminated the ability to just glance off to the side—no clicks, just eye movement—and get valuable information.
Well, the developer wanted to simply explain why it must be that way. Since the initial posting on the forum that tracks bugs and development changes, dozens of people have chimed in to say “we like the old version better.”
This is also the case in the latest release of the otherwise amazing and wonderful Google Earth. They’ve changed the way the navigation works “for the better,” according to all their PR online. According to post after post in the Google support groups, it’s not better, it’s more cumbersome for most users. And the Google Earth support folk “simply explained” that much of the old functionality is there if you hold down the shift key when you click. OK, fine, but that means you can’t just fly it with the mouse..you have to grab the keyboard (if, like me, you’re leaning back in your chair) for one keystroke in a sea of mouse-manipulation. Why!? Why??? Well, they simply explained it was “better” this way.
There’s an even more egregious example—actually several of them—on a product I am under an NDA not to discuss, so I won’t, except to say that like the first example, users who upgrade will find fundamental components of their workflow hobbled in the name of progress. And this app has a LOT of users, cross-platform. It’s big. Huge. Uh-oh.
I think there’s one basic precept all developers should hold dear. If they make a change “for the better,” and they immediately get even a dozen complaints saying “the old way was better,” they are obligated to step out of their own reality distortion field (because, of course, if you’re a developer, you can’t help but be excited by the new features you’ve labored to produce) and see what all the grumbling is about. And then, if there’s a glimmer that they might have broken more than they may have “fixed,” have the courage to roll the behavior back, or provide (at the very least) an option for longtime users to customize back to the old behavior.
Hey, I’m simply explaining.
Carefully framed optimism.
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Okay, so, yeah, we’ve been busy, what with dealing with insurance people and contractors and so on, but on a muggy Atlanta July Sunday morning, I find myself tilting toward optimism.
We have a roofline again. We have a ceiling (well, we have a subfloor) over our dining room again. We have had entertaining framers come early to work (to beat the midafternoon heat) and we (and our house) are standing up to a line of Georgia thunderstorms whipping through town with something just slightly more substantial than tarps propped up on scrap lumber.
We’ve made yet another trip north (in our tree-damage-repaired car). For this up-and-back, we had certain large-ish items on our to-do list mixed in with sociality and conviviality and we managed to check all those to-dos off with a smile…and with new knowledge! Sammy and I now know that if the guy at the hardware store didn’t cut the replacement window glass exactly square, you can sand it down enough to make it fit. It’s easier to buy new toggle bolts than to go up into the attic and try to fish out the old toggles.
These insights don’t have a widespread practical utility, but they do give us a sense that we can push ahead and accomplish a, followed by b, followed by c. Well, sometimes we skip b and go back to it, but it gets done.
It all gets done.
So disturbing.
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
So I went to high school in Ohio with this nice Polish-Italian gal, Michele, who married this guy Dave Daubenmire, who has, in the name of radically fundamental “christian family values”, dragged his family through one embarrassing abomination after another.
There was Coach Dave’s (he was once allowed to coach football at a small Ohio high school) forced, mandatory prayer in the locker room. There was the campaign for bringing churchiness forcefully back into, on top of, and generally obliterating the state. There were his rabid radio shows, and the preaching/protesting at gay pride marchers, and being “in overdrive for the lord”, well, since he lost his last teaching job. There’s his website (nah, no link), filled with connections to groups who want nothing less than a new holy war, a new crusade, a revolution that will replace government with their version of christianity.
He sells coaches’ caps with a cross on them. He is so anti-abortion he says it’s “hedonistic, pagan, and demonic”—and then he really gets started. A woman’s right to choose is incomprehensible to him, and his other written attitudes about women fall into line with the precept that he is the king of his marriage and his family. Terrorism in the womb leads to terrorism in the world. The Constitution never mentions the separation of church and state, he thinks. Income taxes are illegal. Gays make him sick. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama is one of his heroes. The ACLU is…well, you get the idea.
And finally, last year, there was their son, a teacher like his parents, caught with child pornography on his computer. And so I’ve seen Michele’s name, and that of the rest of their family, dragged down through the arrogance of this guy who is just the latest to have the direct line to the Lord’s plan for America.
And just when I thought maybe they would stay out of the headlines, an apparent buddy of his in Mount Vernon, Ohio is now all over the news for, well, teaching Christianity in science class, teaching creationism, and offering extra credit if students went to see the anti-evolution film “Expelled.”
Here’s the Columbus Dispatch article, and an AP report adds:
Freshwater’s friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.
“With the exception of the cross-burning episode. … I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district,” he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.
Freshwater used a science tool known as a high-frequency generator to burn images of a cross on students’ arms in December, the report said. Freshwater told investigators he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an “X,” not a cross. But pictures show a cross, the report said.
Other findings show that Freshwater taught that carbon dating was unreliable to argue against evolution.
Daubenmire is going to make the rounds of Fox News (his web site says) and defend his friend and talk about the values of his corner of small-town Ohio, which he claims to be uniquely in touch with. Well, sure. Gotta sell those ballcaps with crosses.
His wife and I went to school together, were co-editors of the school paper. We could not now be further politically and philosophically apart, it seems.
How does that happen, exactly?
A much nicer whisper campaign.
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Oh, please, read the truth about Barack Obama and pass it on to everyone you know. I especially like that it’s in Courier, the typeface of psuedo-truth.
Departures.
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Just seems like they come in waves sometimes. Since June, the obituaries have been piling up:
- Tim Russert, age 58, political insider turned journalist. Prototypical blue-collar Irish Catholic boy made good.
- Stan Winston, age 62, four-time Academy Award winning master of real-world (as opposed to CGI) visual effects and creatures.
- Alton Kelley, age 67, graphic artist and illustrator, known for his psychedelic art, and 1960s rock concert posters.
- Yves Saint Laurent, age 71, fashion designer, businessman.
- Algis Budrys, age 77, Hugo-winning science fiction writer.
- Bo Diddley, age 79, a man with a rhythm all his own.
- Tony Schwartz, age 84, the “media consultant,” ad guy, and jazz preservationist who came up with the LBJ “Daisy” political ad in 1964.
- Jim McKay, age 86, sportscaster, television pioneer.
Meanwhile, we and our loved ones get our tests and try to eat right and stretch and walk and do, you know, all the right things to avoid showing up on the departure board anytime soon.
(Update: Cyd Charisse, the very next day.)
Life uprooted, again.
Friday, May 16th, 2008
When a big old oak tree hits your house, it gets your attention. It also focuses your attention on a completely different set of aspects of your life.
As you may have heard, we have been thus refocused. The towering oak between our western neighbors and our driveway fell Sunday night in our direction, and now, at the end of the week, we are, amazingly, back into what’s left of our house, living amidst tarped roofs and zipwalled-off sections inside what is usually a comfortable, familiar home base.
There’s a photo album here with captions that walk you through the process from tree to tarp…we didn’t have much in the way of internet, digital cameras, or iphones back the last time an oak tree felled our home, but boy, we have captured the pixels this week.
So I’m contemplating the mental and physical remnants of the last treefall…as shattered drywall and splintered lumber were carefully extracted from the northwest corner of our house, one of the large 2-by-sixes was clearly labeled “to Sawhorse, Atlanta GA”—the contractors who rebuilt this place in 1991, and who may well reconstruct it for its next seventeen years or so of turbulent existence here in this century. As I box up dining room objets-d’almost-art and drag clothes I will never wear again from our amazingly-intact upstairs closet, I take a census of stuff—how did we come to have this much of it? What do we keep? What do we toss? How stuff-filled a life do we choose in our next chapter?
In many ways, we are so fortunate…much more so than our fellow metro residents (down in Clayton County) who were sent a fresh tornado the same weekend. Much more so than the blue-tarped denizens of Cabbagetown and East Atlanta who are still dealing with the mid-March tornado that wreaked havoc on a line east out of downtown (and they were forced to deal with Sunday’s winds and Thursday’s rain with their houses already crushed and tarped). And so, so much more fortunate we are than the victims of natural disasters in Myanmar and China which struck around the time of our little crisis. Their losses, made much worse by governments who pretend (even more than ours does) that they’re doing a heck of a job even as the side effects of the storms and quakes reverberate and revisit. It’s hard for us to even focus on external events this week, but when we do, and when we see pictures from the other side of the planet, we shudder and are thankful just as you are when you look at our pictures and count your blessings.
So in that fine American middle class milieu we seem to have ended up in, we are indeed fine. And will be fine. And eventually, so will our home.
I’m sure we’ll be the beneficiaries of improvements in construction materials and techniques, and I know we’ll have a better-insulated, healthier, more energy-efficient house when we’re done. It’s gonna take most of the summer.
This is my brain on fonts.
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
It was particularly wonderful for James, Rebecca, and Brigid to get me the DVD of Helvetica for my birthday. It sat here unwatched, however, “awaiting just the right moment,” until last night, when Sammy and I had a razor-sharp viewing on our fine HDTV screen…even the standard-def DVD looked outstanding.
It was so worth the wait.
There it was, the story of a font as old as I am, the font that seemed so stunningly new and clean to me on the side of NYC garbage trucks and along the multicolored routes angling through Massimo Vignelli’s NYC subway map. The font that probably was my first Letraset purchase, and therefore used in my painstakingly (and crushingly) kerned logo for my high school newspaper-turned-magazine. The font that became the ubiquitous signature of 1970s corporate America. The font that brightened up the sooty Greyhound buses that took me across the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Ohio to New York. The font I brought excitedly to the corporate identity of SuperStationWTBS. And now, the font that greets me in bright Target red when I drive down to Caroline Street to buy toilet paper.
And here were the international masters of modern design and typography discussing their own particular loves and hates of the font that somehow changed everything…and nothing. Kelley’s type teacher Matthew Carter. Gotham god Tobias Frere-Jones. Spiekermann. Scher. Hoefler. Brody. Carson, so many more.
In their self-proclaimed type nerdiness I recognized the pulls I’ve felt since I was first aware there were things called typefaces. I could relate to all their persnicketiness and flashes of ego, their romance with the magic of type on the page and their contempt for all things mediocre (Erik Spiekermann‘s evisceration of Microsoft on the DVD extras is so damn entertaining)…and I especially connected with the moments where they paused, looked aside, and seemed to grasp for greater meaning in something that is ultimately an alphanumeric collection of light and dark shapes…and failed, one after the other, quite to put it into words.
Well, exactly.
Coffee, tea, or soup.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Up there on my bookshelf, along with my pointlessly-displayed local television awards, collections of caps, and mardi gras beads (a gift from a news director in New Orleans) is something I really treasure…my ABC World News Now coffee, tea, or soup mug, which, I should explain, was not so much earned from the program (they gave them out as prizes) as cajoled from a buddy who was a powerhouse at Good Morning America back at the turn of the nineties when WNN was given license to take over the overnight airwaves at ABC.
Quirky, offbeat, irreverent, the show was certainly a tonic for me—back when I had to do design in the overnight hours in order to make the financial and technological equation work, I usually had the program on in the control room, and the voices of anchors Aaron Brown and Lisa McRee brought welcome sanity to some quiet early morning hours.
The show was largely crafted (cobbled?) together by Brown and then-executive-producer David Bohrman, and featured witty writing, cardboard cutouts of absent anchors, a review of how morning newspapers worldwide would be covering stories, super-sarcastic sports, a cryptic World News Now ‘National Temperature Index’, and, on Fridays, long credits accompanied by a guy on accordian doing the World News Polka.
Really, that’s just about all you need to get you through the night.
And because they celebrated their 16th anniversary earlier this year, I’ve been able to find a couple of YouTube videos which feature Brown and Bohrman talking about what they wrought and where the parade of distinguished anchors are now (Anderson Cooper, Thalia Assuras, Alison Stewart, and a raft of literate Canadians have populated the WNN anchor chairs over the years.)
World News Now owes some large debt to Lloyd Dobbins and Linda Ellerbee’s as-quirky-but-shorter (and shorter-lived) NBC News Overnight, which premiered on the night of a lunar eclipse on July 6, 1982. It might even be said that they both owe a tip of the hat to WTCG/WTBS’s Bill Tush and Tina Seldin, and their beyond-quirky 17 Update Early in The Morning on the nascent SuperStation.
I bring all this up mostly to say: I think that there remains a market for quirk…especially literate quirk, at all hours of the day or night. Bohrman recalls “There were a million people watching this show every night…that’s where Larry King peaks out, at a million people.” There’s a lot of television and internet programmers who would be very satisfied with that much viewership.
Bohrman, by the way, went on to create the short-ish-lived NewsNight with Aaron Brown at CNN and then apparently had some sort of nightmare that involved being trapped with Wolf Blitzer inside a Best Buy, that led to The Situation Room on CNN.
Quirk and wit works—if you can create a hip club that welcomes people in, doesn’t insult their intelligence, and offers a relaxed smile with their buffet of information.
In some ways the best internet commentary sites (oh, okay, blogs) are traceable descendants of programs like this. If cable networks would hand over the keys to the control room to upholders of this tradition of wry information, presented with a chuckle (as opposed to, say, streaming nonstop informercials) my mug of happiness would run over.
The looming squirrel threat.
Friday, April 4th, 2008
We started (well, for me, started) the day yesterday with a 20 minute or so power failure, which appeared to affect at least our whole block. Gee, I guess so:
Squirrel Knocks Out Power in Midtown
ATLANTA — About 7,000 residents were left without power in Midtown Atlanta Thursday morning due to the workings of a tiny critter.
Georgia Power officials said a squirrel somehow got into a substation and knocked out the power in the area, including Colony Square. The power was restored after 20 minutes.
The squirrel was killed during his explorations, officials said.
By electricity, I’d assume…not by the ever-vigilant forces we’ve been told are protecting our valiant homeland’s infrastructure.
Somehow satisfying to be able to figure out—or in some cases, actually watch—“what happened” online, even when the what happened is, as often the case in the big city, violent and unnerving.
I came out one morning to find two news helicopters hovering directly overhead our house…a few days later, some modest Googling brought up this police action (video with siren sounds, btw) around the corner at the same time and date, caught, as they like to say these days, on tape, and then pushed out to the world on YouTube. As far as I could tell from the Atlanta police reports, there was no one actually shot—just the aftermath of a police chase, despite how the video’s labeled.
Case(s) closed?
Quality views, on fine linen (pixels.)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
The Boston Public Library is putting scanned images from several of their collections up on Flickr (as did the Library of Congress before them), and the first few I happen across bring back fond memories of my Vermont past. And, apropos of the Barre High School there, did I mention that my father’s name is Robert Burns? Mhm.
Most of the ones I’ve paged through so far are the work of the Tichnor Brothers, whom I first heard of years ago, from my Goddard buddy and postcard afficianado Alice J.
Oh, please, just read the sign.
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
…but what if the question goes on and on and on? Hm. It’s the same caution icon as is on my shoes.
Mooving along.
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Just finished reading a borrowed copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s nearly decade-old book Nickel and Dimed, about the realities of the American working poor, including a section where she worked as a $7 an hour Walmart employee in Minneapolis…and was hard-pressed to find affordable rental housing that microscopic a wage could support.
So it was in that context (and when I think of Walmart, most of my thoughts are along the lines of: Walmart = evil) that I came across this surprising report that would earn a ‘breaking news’ from me, were I in charge of CNN’s Situation Room:
Giant food retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced that its store brand milk in the United States will now come exclusively from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.
Wow. And then I read further on down the page:
Grocery chain Kroger Co., with 2,500 stores in the U.S., began last month selling only milk produced without the use of hormones like recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). Safeway Inc., with more than 1,700 stores, has switched its in-store brands to non-rBST milk, though it also sells other brands produced from cows given the hormone. And starting in January, Starbucks Corp. has only used non-rBST milk in its stores.
This was one of the main reasons we had walked away from Kroger as any regular supplier of staples like milk and eggs…milk’s not a bargain if you don’t want what’s in it…and folks for whom milk of any kind is a big-dollar purchase are certainly not in a position to choose stuff that may be better for them.
And, as a bit of a rebuke to big corporate PR firms out there, I hadn’t heard Kroger had made any kind of switch…I guess I’ll have to go down to the Wino Kroger (in Atlanta, we’ve given our Krogers various neighborhood-appropriate names, starting with the immortal Disco Kroger in Buckhead) and see for myself this is the case. After all, I don’t want Kroger visits just to be about buying Tab three times a year.
It sounds like they simply heard the drumbeat of a zillion consumers’ demands, or talied the votes-with-their-pocketbooks numbers, or something. At any rate, it’s hard not to cheer on the end result.
By the way, Ehrenreich’s blog has a bunch of thought-provoking fomentations, including her discussion of a Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet piece in the September 2007 Mother Jones where she wonders whether Hillary’s pastor problem might be worse than Barack’s. The Joyce/Harlet piece says:
Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship.
Gulp.
And one final Ehrenreich writing: Welcome to Cancerland is her examination of the “marketplace” that has sprung up around breast cancer “awareness,” and it’s written in the context of her own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.
