An Austrailian mathemetician has figured out the best way to lace your shoes. From the NYTimes: A shoe with two rows of six eyelets offers 43,200 different paths for a shoelace to pass through every eyelet, even with the added condition that each eyelet must contribute to the essential purpose of pulling the two halves […]
Continue reading... December 9, 2002
Blinding Flash of the Journalistically Obvious
The American Society of Newspaper Editors has suddenly discovered that reporters are not in touch with lower- and middle-class Americans. From the LATimes (free registration required): As recently as 1971, only 58% of newspaper journalists had college degrees; now 89% have degrees, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But only 15.5% of the […]
Continue reading... December 9, 2002
Tone Deaf
So there’s going to be a new face running the Treasury Department. I was wondering when that would happen; it struck me as odd that the Treasury Secretary was traipsing around Africa with Bono when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. Still, I wonder about this new guy. It’s hardly unusual to pick someone from Industry […]
Continue reading... November 27, 2002
More on Boot Camp
You’d think that for a place that had so many reporters, there’d be better stories coming out. I’ve been trolling around for reports from the Pentagon’s pre-invasion boot camp for journos. By far the best is from UPI’s Pam Hess. (Yes, Virginia, there’s still a UPI, even with some of the old hands at the switch — though […]
Continue reading... November 22, 2002
Feiss Speaks!
You all know about the Apple “Switch” campaign. One of the spokespeople, a teenager named Ellen Feiss, became an instant Internet celebrity (for some small value of “celebrity”) not so much for what she said but because she truly looked and sounded like she was on another plane of sobriety when she said it. Feiss, […]
Continue reading... November 21, 2002
Music Music Music
If you know a singer, you know that they’re heading into the heavy season now. If a vocalist isn’t busy in the months before Christmas and Easter — even if there isn’t a single other booking for the year — something is very seriously wrong. For November 1 (All Saint’s Day), I was in a pretty successful J.S. […]
Continue reading... November 19, 2002
They’ll Be Hearing From My Lawyer
I am not alone. I’ve known for some time that there are other Dan Rosenbaums out there. One of them is an economist, I think with an undergraduate degree from Princeton, where he played softball (Google is a wonderful thing). Another is an editor at Tennis magazine. Yet a third contributes every so often to […]
Continue reading... November 19, 2002
War School
In a way, you can’t blame the Pentagon for wanting to keep reporters away from the action. Since the draft ended, few writers have ever served in the military, so they don’t have much idea of what they’re writing about. Though it’s true that any good reporter can learn most any beat, it’s a little […]
Continue reading... November 19, 2002
Hed Goes Here
Just in time for Christmas, a couple of New York Post reporters have come out with a game that can make you — yes, even you — a tabloid-headline-writing machine. From Editor & Publisher: “The one thing we really noticed in developing this is that most people who played the game, including journalists, ended up […]
Continue reading... November 18, 2002
Olberman Apologizes
My friend Angela Gunn points out Keith Olberman’s public apology to pretty much anyone he’s ever worked for and with. It’s an impressive list, and an impressive piece. Olberman, best known for anchoring ESPN’s SportsCenter, is ex-UPI, ex-ESPN, ex-NBC, and not-yet-ex ABC. Along the way, he gained the reputation of being the new Howard Cosell […]
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