Privacy and reporting on personal lives

Interesting guidelines, phrased as suggestions and best practices rather than rules, from a project designed to help bloggers and independent journalists — and professional organizations too — develop their own codes of ethics. Celebrities know a loss of privacy is a cost of fame. Politicians and other public servants know their power brings public scrutiny, and they carry that awareness into many of the decisions they make. That doesn’t mean, however,…

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Topical Satire Is Not “Fake News.”

While I’ve been preparing to teach a class on memes and “fake news,” my complaints are all about propaganda that misleads in order to wield influence or make money. I am not talking about the “fake news” which is clever satire, such as these two posts which made me belly-laugh. The Sanders pic I found in my Facebook feed, where it had been posted on P-diddy’s page. The Obama pic is…

Little Things

I recently came across an abandoned stash of tiny doll shoes. When TeenGirl was little, she would take the tiny shoes off her tiny dolls, and if she momentarily lost one, she’d be distraught. My wife finally got all the shoes in one place, put them on a ledge, and we all forgot about them. This magazine article describes a subculture based on the aesthetic of miniatures, and the mastercrafting…

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When it comes to the truth, point of view really does matter.

You may have seen a version of this meme floating around. I don’t know the source of the original, but just now I came across an adaptation by Haplo Schaffer: I like it, but I had some thoughts of my own. Hah! And showing that Haplo is an open-minded good sport about this whole thing…. More feedback… again, Haplo is being admirably open-minded, and her followers are participating in a…