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The Flying Brides ~ Brian Schwartz
Posted	on	 September 23, 2010
Eden and I are in San Francisco, looking at Chagalls. It's the summer of 2002, and there is a retrospective of the painter's work at the city's museum of modern art; we bought tickets in advance so we could fit the exhibition into our brief vacation. Now we are walking through wide rooms, meeting canvas after canvas. Eden wanted to spring for the headphones, so we're hearing an actor's voice, too, as he gives bits of context and interpretation. But no audio tour-guide is required to see that brides are all over Chagall's work. Not just women, but women in white gowns, with silky trains so long it seems many of the female figures have no legs—they fly instead of walk, trailing their bridal finery through purplish skies, usually clutched by a groom. As varied as the landscapes are in these teeming compositions, the addition of an embracing bridal pair is like a jubilant tic in Chagall—it recurs in painting after painting. It's an earthbound element—just a couple of village kids tying the knot—but it's also oddly divine, because the couples defy gravity so easily.
Even if the married couples in his paintings are sometimes granted supernatural powers of flight and flexibility, Chagall's work suggests that marriage is part of the natural order of things. The majority of brides in Chagall, buxom and red-cheeked, seem excited to be doing what their mothers and grandmothers did: taking a young husband, becoming part of a chain of tradition rooted in centuries of Jewish and Eastern European culture. I usually find the bridal imagery in Chagall both profound and a bit treacly; it's colorful, hopeful, and obsolete. There is this weird, intriguing blend of nostalgia and eroticism. I've thought this before when I've come across his work—Chagall has a wonderful sense of color and composition, but is he just the nice Jewish boy who could paint pretty colors?
I was 28 years old, unmarried, when we flew to San Francisco and looked at the Chagalls. At that time in my life, between 2001 and 2003, I worked for a newspaper company in midtown Manhattan. The company published several free weeklies; the papers came out every Wednesday, appearing in inky stacks in the lobbies of apartment buildings, stuffed into creaky, graffiti-stained metal boxes that stood like corrupted crossing guards on Upper West and East Side street corners. These free neighborhood newspapers were trucked to their various destinations across Manhattan by a wispy, profane eighty-year-old named Sal, a salty native of Brooklyn who claimed to have been a promising minor league ballplayer long ago. Although I'd introduced myself to him a few times, Sal had no idea what my name was or what I did at the company; still, he was always more than happy to talk with me (or anyone else in the office) about his life, past or present. He was gregarious, one of those people who never seemed distressed about anything—although his job, as I imagined it, was full of hellish midnight odysseys through Manhattan in a rusty van laden with unwanted newspapers and ex-con temp-workers, arms covered with bluish homemade tattoos.
One day without warning Sal told me a gross story about his girlfriend's dog. (I didn't know he had a girlfriend before he told me about her dog, but it made sense that Sal, with his gold chains and verbal brio, was an actively dating senior citizen.) Sal was leaning with his arms crossed over the low wall of my desk space, dark eyes filling up the twin screens of his old man's thick eyeglasses, lips pulled back from yellow dentures in a smile. "I was taking my girlfriend's dog for a walk," Sal reported. "She lives up in Astoria, in Queens, you know, that's getting to be kind of a nice neighborhood. And in the middle of this walk, the fuckin dog squats on the sidewalk, starts taking this shit, you should have seen this, it was huge! While the dog is shitting, this nice young couple walks by, an' they're staring, y'know, they're horrified by my girlfriend's dog. They can't believe there's dog shit in their nice fuckin neighborhood! An' I started laughing!"
In San Francisco, Eden and I are standing in front of Chagall's "A Midnight Summer Dream," oil on canvas, 1939. There is a bride close to the center of the painting, and she's nearly as tall as the canvas. Her expression is impassive—she almost looks drowsy or drugged, but more than anything she seems to be summoning great patience. Her gown is white. There is a lacy trace in the fabric near her wrist, and a wedding band on her middle finger. She's holding a blue fan near her hip.
A sort of groom holds the bride in his arms. The groom is not ordinary: he has a donkey's head, with the suggestion of candy-striped horns. His giant eye is leering; there's a rough hint of teeth between his mulish lips. His hand is not clutching but caressing, a bit too much wiggle in his fingers, something obsequious about it.
I'm troubled by the painting. The audio guide's voice breaks in through my headphones, warning me not to conflate Chagall's painting with Shakespeare's play. The title is slightly different, the voice points out. The guide then urges us to notice how the bride is holding her blue fan: it's covering the donkey's crotch, "perhaps cooling his ardor," says the voice. Eden and I both laugh at this. We exchange a look and move on to the next painting, still smiling.
But the painting with the donkey-headed groom defies comfortable quaintness. There's no village scene, no sense of human community. The mule, in his wrinkled brown suit, may be an interloper, the creature who broke up the wedding and tempted the bride away. He may be an exotic stranger from outside the shtetl. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the mule-headed man might indeed be the bride's husband, a groom transformed by marriage into a pleading ass, unfamiliar even to himself. In the summer of 2002, Eden and I are not yet married. Unlike most of Chagall's work, "A Midnight Summer Dream" seems to counsel against marriage.
Art is beautiful and it's rude; like old Sal, it's more than willing to tell dirty stories that we may not want to hear.
And I think that's why it can be difficult to pass up audio guides when they're available at museums. It's reassuring to let those headphones settle over our ears so we can listen to someone else's sense of what a painting is trying to tell us. That way we don't have to confront what we don't know about a piece of art.
It would also be useful for me, on certain occasions, to have an audio guide for Jewish marriage and family life, a special headset I could wear whenever my ignorance of tradition (or my lack of common sense) becomes too burdensome. I could adjust the headphones until the plastic band tightened across my pate where a kipa ought to go. I could punch in a code number that corresponded to a particular scenario, and the guide, with his modulated theatrical timbre, would offer insights and advice inflected by centuries of Jewish wisdom.
In a sense, this is a vision of what it's like to grow up in an observant Jewish family; tradition to some extent dictates what to do, say, even think at a particular time of year, on a particular day of the week. Any family, Jewish or otherwise, that regularly "prays together"—they are plugged into a current, a pre-made manner of participating in a larger circle of people as part of a temple, a church, a community. But my family wasn't like that. My parents generated very little Judaism in our household. Tradition was pain for them, both of them. So what they gave each of their children was a bar or bat mitzvah and a whole lot of choices.
Chagall's paintings, by and large, are images of real, planted-in-the-soil purpose. That's on my mind as Eden and I fly from San Francisco back to New York: I think of the characters in those colorful paintings, how they belong in the vibrant settings that contain them.
The next day I return to my dead-end job working for a newspaper nobody reads.
Some years before I moved to New York, my older brother and his wife Becky lived with their kids in a small Manhattan apartment not far from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Steve was attending rabbinical school. It was still hard to get used to the idea of my brother becoming a rabbi, but that was what he'd chosen to do.
I was living in California at the time. Whenever I called long-distance from the West Coast, Becky would pick up in New York and tell me, "Bri, you have to meet the babysitter." I learned that their babysitter's name was Eden. I understood that my sister-in-law wanted me to find a nice Jewish girl, but I was surprised that Becky continued to insist on the match even though this babysitter and I lived on opposite coasts. At my sister-in-law's insistence, I called Eden on the phone during a trip to the East Coast. We didn't meet face to face, but during our conversation I learned two appealing things. The first was that Eden had a pleasant voice—a voice I wanted to keep hearing. The second was that Eden, an English major in college, was a modern dancer. That meant she was creative and athletic. But I assumed that, like most creative and athletic women I knew, she also had a boyfriend of some kind.
I didn't speak to her again for another four years. In the fall of 2000, I moved back east and settled in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Park Slope. Purely by accident, I chose an apartment that was a ten-minute walk from where Eden lived at the time; my sister-in-law discovered this somehow, and she wouldn't let up: Bri, you have to meet her. You're neighbors! This helped me get over my aversion to the set-up—I convinced myself that meeting Eden was about Christian neighborliness, not Jewish matchmaking.
We met for the first time at Ozzie's coffee house in Park Slope, Brooklyn—a good choice for a chaste meeting place. Ozzie's is well lit, filled with the homey odor of roasted coffee beans. A wall of enormous windows looks out onto the street. Inside, young children crawl and play on beat-up couches while their parents guzzle fresh-roasted java, the unsung pillar of American childcare, the sweet essential fuel powering parents through times of sheer exhaustion. Ozzie's coffee house is more a tribute to the results of romance—kids, threadbare furniture, caffeine—than to romance itself. And yet while it wasn't a likely setting for a memorable date, this is where I first saw my wife.
It was a winter night. Eden hadn't yet taken off her coat; the scarf around her neck added to my sense that she was bundled up, dressed for practical purposes, not trying to impress anyone. This was something of a relief for me. When we sat down with our cups of coffee, I could see that Eden was young and beautiful. I noticed—I couldn't help noticing—her large, dark eyes, her delicate neck. Eden's beauty didn't trouble me, though, the way it would have if I'd thought we were on a date. This amounted to a moment of grace for me: we chatted away about books and dance and Brooklyn as though there was nothing at stake, as if no underground shtetl machinery was turning its gears to bring us together. I liked her. I was glad to know this person was in my neighborhood. She was not the aggressively hip Bohemian I'd expected; she was quiet, thoughtful, a little goofy. Eden had a Chaplinesque way of using her dark eyes to express surprise or emphasis. I'd presumed a ballerina; instead, here was this understated comedian.
While I'm mildly embarrassed by the family intervention—the old shtetl spirit—that helped Eden and I begin our relationship, there has always been a part of me that was ready to subscribe to this antiquated idea of Jewish matchmaking. I am, after all, a Jew. There is comfort in the notion that people you trust might help you find a suitable mate, which is akin to finding or recognizing a part of yourself—maybe a part of yourself that's missing. We tend to think that this sort of searching involves breaking away from parentage and personal history to transcend the givens of our lives. But when the givens are distressed and ambiguous—as my immediate family's Jewish identity surely was—then maybe we're more likely to reach back for different elements of our heritage, examine them, value them. Eventually Eden and I were married in the same temple that my brother and Becky were married in, the temple in downtown Gloucester where Eden went to Hebrew school as a child. In a world of vanishing Jews, we became a new Jewish couple.
By the time Eden and I met, our broader culture had become innovatively alert to the possibilities of matchmaking. More and more people, it seemed, were being set up or connected by online networks and dating services. I would read articles about speed-dating and wonder what it would feel like to be serially scored by several single women in the span of an hour or so. Ultimately, my matchmaking experience was much less innovative, less instant, but still I relied on a network. Now, for me, the match that led to my marriage evokes the joyous imagery of Chagall. It tells a story about continuity and tradition.
I had to take the N train from Brooklyn every weekday to get to the newspaper company's offices in Manhattan. One morning, as the N crawled up out of its subterranean hole onto the Manhattan Bridge, I realized that a coworker of mine was on the same train, standing just a few feet away. I had no particular desire to speak to this person—the truth is I would've preferred to avoid him—but before I could look away we made eye contact. Now we had to talk.
As the N train squeaked along above the glittering, almost clean-seeming East River, we exchanged pleasantries. I steeled myself for an awkward conversation. This coworker of mine was the star of the newspaper's ad sales department, a fast-talking man with a boy's face, a gap between his front teeth, and long hair that fell to the base of his neck. Through the office rumor-mill, I'd heard that he had an open marriage and regularly exercised the benefits. Indeed one of the first things I'd learned about the salesman, several months back, was that he was having an affair with a pretty young woman in the accounting department. "He's married, and she's engaged—it's kind of her last fling," the managing editor told me matter-of-factly during my first week on the job. "You don't need to know this, of course, but you might as well. Everyone else does."
Now here I was, face-to-face with the pudgy office Lothario. "Where do you live?" he asked, as the train groaned and swayed. "Okay, yeah, I've seen you around there. You live with your girlfriend? What's her name, again?"
"Eden," I told him, as a quiet but insistent alarm went off somewhere in my mind.
"How long you been with her?"
"Two years," I said. Then, thinking (despite all evidence to the contrary) that it might ward him off, I added, "We're thinking about getting married."
"That's great!" the salesman said. "Good for you. When?"
"We don't know," I admitted. "We're thinking about it. We talk about it."
"Look," the salesman said, "don't waste too much time thinking and talking about it. Get married, you know? I mean, you're never totally ready. But then you get married, and it's great. It's the same with kids. You can't know what it's going to be like before you do it; if it's something you want, though, trust yourself. Getting married and having kids, those are the best things I've done. I love my wife. It would have been stupid not to get married when we did, you know? You have doubts and reservations, and that's natural, but you can't worry about that stuff. You have to live."
How might Chagall have painted my randy, earnest, loving co-worker? Was this happy husband an earthbound mule or a passionate bridegroom, taking flight? How are tradition and commitment tied together—by a ring? A ritual?
On the day Eden and I were married, as our wedding guests began to arrive, a trio of musicians stood together at the front of the temple sanctuary, to one side of the white wedding canopy. A tall young man with a red beard strummed a stand-up bass; a woman with thick chestnut hair played violin; another woman, black-haired and slight, cradled an accordion in her arms as though dandling a baby. The trio's music was lilting, playful and poignant—klezmer music, but soft, mostly strings, no loud blasts of trombone, no loony forays of a clarinet. The majority of our guests, as they slid into the temple's old wooden pews to take their seats, would have recognized the music as Jewish without remembering the word klezmer. As the members of our wedding party began to walk down the aisle, the trio played old airs from Eastern Europe that echoed strains from shtetl weddings a century or more before. I watched my parents walk ahead of me down the aisle, arm in arm; I could feel my heart beating hard as I entered the sanctuary, following in the footsteps of my mother and father. Everyone was looking at me, but I didn't know where to look. I could barely feel my feet. The new shoes I wore, soles still smooth, made the temple floor feel like a frictionless oil slick. But the music drew me forward, helped me keep my balance, and soon I stood under the wedding canopy, listening to the song, watching Eden walk toward me in her gown. After we said our vows, exchanged rings, kissed—and after I stamped my foot down on a napkin-wrapped lightbulb—the musicians broke into a celebratory up-tempo song. The music helped give our feelings a form. People cheered and sang mazel tov as Eden and I made our way to the rear of the sanctuary. But this hint of raucousness was subdued and soft compared to the performance of the full wedding band.
Our reception was at a seaside Elks Club with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on to the Atlantic Ocean. The view was astounding; the space itself, though, was plain, its most notable visual detail an old elk's head on the wall near the kitchen door. Our caterer had suggested that we drape peyes—the long sidelocks of hair worn by Hasidic Jews—over the elk's furry ears, but we never found the time or the materials to pull this off. Instead, the unadorned elk's head looked down on the far end of the dance floor, where the band was just beginning to play.
An hour earlier, at the temple, the trio of musicians had been demure, even solemn. But when they joined with their band mates to play our reception, the performance of their full septet was radically different. The band started out in klezmer mode, but this time the driving sound of the trombone gave the music an earthy, comic quality. The accordionist got everyone out on the floor to dance the hora, and for several minutes our wedding reception resembled the Jewish weddings I'd gone to as a child—resembled my brother's wedding too, as people danced in a circle, my family, Eden's family, our friends all wrapping around each other in that boisterous round arrangement.
Two chairs were brought forth. As soon as Eden and I sat down, we were lifted up high and flying like the village youths imagined by Chagall, held aloft by friends, raised and bounced until our heads were bobbing close to the ceiling beams.
In the space of three hours the band played polished versions of "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" by the Ramones, "Beast of Burden" by the Rolling Stones, and "If Not For You" by Bob Dylan, in addition to Yiddish folk tunes with titles like "Rumanye," "Grine Kuzine" and "Zlatopol." It was a confluence of popular music from two different centuries, and hearing the different types of song side by side—Mick Jagger arm-in-arm with Isaac Bashevis Singer, so to speak—allowed me to hear the spirit of rock in old Jewish music. The Yiddish songs were about love and longing, the pleasures and pains of commitment, the sorrow of understanding that the past was gone. That day, my wedding day, I heard more yearning and more blues in klezmer music than I'd ever recognized before. For the first time I understood that the yearning had always been there in the old music, when it was played right.
The name of our wedding band, Golem, references a medieval Jewish legend about a monstrous creature fashioned from clay. According to this legend, the golem was sculpted by a rabbi near the city of Prague, brought to life when a scrap of parchment bearing God's name was placed in its mouth; the clay monster's mission was to protect Prague's Jews from the pogroms and pillaging stirred up by a cruelly anti-Semitic ruler. The golem, a cross between Superman and Frankenstein, shielded an entire community of Jews and helped them preserve their way of life in the face of violent bigotry. Or so the story goes. Because of this, the myth of the golem, ancient and idiosyncratic, has had a special resonance for contemporary Jews in the decades after the Holocaust. The mysterious monster has undergone many literary and pop-culture resurrections in recent years, most notably in Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. (And that title is no misnomer, in case you're wondering—the force with which Chabon's book reanimates the old Jewish myth of the golem is truly amazing.)
During our wedding reception, a number of my male friends came up to me and asked about the accordionist who was leading the band. Her accordion was low-slung; she kept the instrument down near her hips, and she shook and swayed her body with purpose as she played. Until I saw the band Golem, I had no interest in accordions. As musical instruments go, the accordion seemed awkward, unwieldy and needlessly complicated—plus the instrument's voice seemed a bit, well, nasal. Yet Golem's accordionist, as she shook her hips and belted out Yiddish lyrics, infused her instrument with sex appeal. The violinist, too—my friends wanted to know about her. She was attractive. She was talented. And it wasn't just the women in the band; the lead singer, a scruffy young man with a partly-unbuttoned ruffled tuxedo shirt, caught more than one woman's eye that day.
Golem may seem like a strange name for a wedding band—even a Jewish one—because the clay monster-man from the folktale is a reminder of pogroms and persecution. But then Golem is a strange band. They're a collective of skilled performers whose work strikes me as original and new even though I know every song they claim as their own is old, well-worn, traditional. I have their oeuvre on my computer; at the touch of a button they can take me back 200 years. And listening to Golem feels like traveling back in time. But their music is also immediate, even urgent.
The band Golem is working Chagall's side of the street, I know, but like the painter they can't be comfortably contained by the nostalgic boundaries of the old, idealized shtetl. There's something more there.
When your brother is a rabbi, you may find that your own wedding is a bit more Jewish than you expected it to be. You may find, for instance, that you and your betrothed are shopping for a ketuba—a traditional Jewish wedding contract, inked and illuminated by a professional calligrapher. You might buy one, and the text of it might read, in Hebrew, something along these lines: "As her loving husband you must provide for her maintenance." Years later, you might look back on the whole thing and think, What a wonderful, meaningful event in my life and my partner's life. The dancing, the family blessings, the rituals, the party. At the same time, in completely contradictory fashion, you might look back and also think, What an odd thing, that we agreed to do all that, that we went out and bought this ketuba, which suggests that men need to protect, that women need to serve, and that the first source of wisdom for our relationship comes not from the ongoing dialogue we build but from the tradition we barely practice in our everyday lives.
Eden and I had a relatively old-fashioned Jewish ceremony, even though neither one of us was an observant Jew. Some of our reasons for choosing this sort of ceremony are easy to name: we wanted my brother to officiate, and that meant leaning more toward tradition than we might have otherwise; the temple where we were married, Eden's hometown temple, was a Conservative shul with certain requirements (all men were asked to cover their heads with a kipa inside the sanctuary, for instance); I'd grown up attending my cousins' Jewish weddings and had a lot of affection—maybe nostalgia, too—for the huppah, the smashed glass, the dance of lifted chairs. I was a sort of amateur devotee of Jewish weddings, and had a hard time thinking of ways to improve on the traditions I'd been moved by so often in the past.
I suspect that a number of our friends found our wedding surprisingly—even disappointingly—traditional. As I've mentioned, Eden and I never made Jewish observance a very large part of our lives in New York, so it's understandable that some of the wedding guests who made the trip from the city were taken aback by the kipa requirement, the klezmer music, the kosher food. When I look back on that weekend, even I'm surprised by the extent to which Yiddish and Hebrew informed the rhythms of the formal and informal festivities. I'd like to think that everyone enjoyed taking a turn at the traditional that day, that the sign next to the sanctuary door—We ask that all men cover their heads out of respect for the Jewish tradition—was innocuous and couldn't possibly have rubbed anyone the wrong way. But of course it probably did. I've been to Catholic masses before, but I've never taken communion. Had no interest, didn't want to, wasn't even sure what the ritual meant. We are not used to trying on and taking off the symbols of a tradition. And our discomfort in such moments is itself a signal that tradition can still play a powerful role in our thinking.
Two summers after we got married, Eden had the opportunity to tour through parts of Eastern Europe with a modern dance company she'd been working with for several years. I decided to tag along on the trip. Eden and I were both excited: we could visit our friends Angharad and David in Berlin, and take a week or so at the end of the tour for a vacation. Our travels through Eastern Europe two years after Eden and I were married gave me some insight as to why our wedding band chose to call themselves by the name of a legendary protector of embattled Jews. Perhaps the members of Golem think of themselves as reviving and transmitting aspects of a fragile, often forgotten culture. The sexual charisma of the band, the pleasure they take in playing their music, suggests a vision of Jewish marriage, culture and history that skirts narratives of victimization and hardship, and concentrates instead on vigorous living. When Golem plays a song from the Yiddish folk canon, their performance is about the humanity of Jews. They are reminding us that Jews of the shtetl were more than funny farmers with daughters to marry off—these ancestral Jews drank, danced with abandon, passionately fucked and feasted when they were able. Even the most pious among them were human beings, and the traditions of the Jewish wedding, klezmer music very much included, provided (still provide) a frame for that humanity.
Usually Chagall depicts the marital embrace as an airborne dance that transcends the niggling details of domestic life. He offers Judaism as a brand of secular, somehow sexy farming. He can be sickly sweet about this stuff. Lots of kissing in the airspace above the chicken coop.
But then there is the painting with the mannish mule, the one Eden and I saw in San Francisco. It suggests that tradition and ritual are not enough. And at the Art Institute of Chicago, aside from the famous cerulean windows that Chagall installed, there is a canvas of his that is nearly all white. The white canvas is beautiful and desolate. It is not comforting to look at, not something that seduces us with color; it is about devastation, erasure. The village is bare. The sthetl is dying. There is no comfort of a Jewish past that can give us succor in the present. Looking at this painting, we yearn for the other Chagall, the celebratory, bride-crazy Chagall, to tell us, "Don't worry! Just look closer—you'll see happy villagers, horse-groomers, a regular Jewish pastoral. The essence of the Jewish family." But Chagall has taken the folk out of the tale in this painting. The emptiness haunts us. Somehow, we have to define for ourselves what and who we are. The artist isn't going to do it for us; he never meant to do that in the first place.
Golem, Jewish wedding band extraordinaire, seems to tell us with their songs that every generation must remember the Jewish past in their own way. By traveling with their music, playing their Yiddish songs in as many different places as possible, Golem disseminates the idea that Jewish culture can still live in a contemporary world strewn with memorials and museums devoted to the Holocaust. Such memorials do the crucial work of helping us remember the millions who died in the ovens that spread their cancerous smoke across Eastern Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. Golem asks: Is that enough? What parts of that culture are still alive? If we press our lips to the earth, speak the old tongue with enough zeal, what might rise up and move to the sound?


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The Story of Marshall Wilder
hello@lisaslemonade.com
The Origin of "Lemons into Lemonade"
"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." This is a pretty common idiom in the English language, and it's one you hear fairly often when you choose to "live on the bright side." We all know how empowering it feels to turn a hurdle into a springboard; there's a definite satisfaction in extracting something positive out of an otherwise rough situation.
But do you know where the phrase "lemons into lemonade" actually comes from? The saying is attributed to writer Elbert Hubbard. And it was inspired by the legacy of Marshall Pinckney Wilder, a highly successful American author and orator with dwarfism who lived in the late 19th century and led a life full of passion, optimism, and innovation.
Wilder was born in Geneva, New York, on September 19, 1859. When he was still a boy, Wilder's family moved to Rochester, and it was there that Wilder gained local acclaim for his storytelling skills. At the age of 20, Wilder moved to New York City with the goal of becoming a full-time entertainer--and not in the form of a sideshow exhibit, which, in those days, was par-the-course for dwarves like Wilder. By day, Wilder earned a living as an ordinary file boy at a commercial firm. By night, he supplemented his income by performing humorous monologues for 50 cents a show (the equivalent of about $13 per admission ticket in today's money).
Wilder's determination took him from the drawing rooms of New York's wealthy elite to stages across America. In 1883, he traveled to London, where his fan base grew to include members of the British royal family. Prince Albert Edward of Wales (more commonly known as King Edward VII of England) was reportedly such an enormous fan of Wilder that he attended nearly 20 of his performances. Wilder eventually added vaudeville to his repertoire, and in 1904, he embarked on a world tour to entertain folks on a global scale.
Over the course of his career, Wilder would author three books ("The People I've Smiled With" in 1899, "The Sunny Side of the Street" in 1905, and "Smiling Around the World" in 1908), edit humor compendiums, and even act in motion pictures. His charisma, wit, and joyful disposition earned him the adoration of both the public and his fellow performers. Wilder was known to shake the hand--and generously tip--everyone involved in his shows after the final curtain call. He closed all of his correspondences (and the forewords of his books) with the phrase, "Merrily Yours."
By the time Wilder passed away in 1915, he'd earned a reputation as someone who, above all else, faced life's obstacles and his own adversities with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. It was this attitude that inspired Elbert Hubbard to say at Wilder's memorial service, "He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand." At Lisa's Lemonade, Wilder is seen as a role model; we keep copies of his books in our office lobby, and we do our best to share his story whenever possible.
More than anything else, we believe in the power of positivity. We believe that optimism, joy, community, and love can create a spot of brightness in this world of ours. And we believe in nourishing the body to help nourish the mind. Marshall Wilder was an American icon who achieved greatness despite his humble beginnings and less-than-ideal personal circumstances. That's why we look to him for inspiration in our business...and personal philosophy.
Lisa Freeney
famous americans /
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marshall wilder
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I want a refund for this product- as far as I can see, this is a SCAM that promises MUCH more than it delivers.


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Seven years ago when witnessing the excavation at the Thang Long Citadel archaeological site and seeing with her own eyes ancient pottery pieces, Nguyen Thu Thuy was very interested in the artifacts that show the flow of history throughout the dynasties of Ly, Tran, Le and Nguyen. She then had a chance to visit some outdoor pottery works in Germany, Italy and Spain when attending a journalist training course in Germany that made her think much about the immortality of pottery, a very familiar material, and found ways to apply it to Hanoi.
Part of the ceramic mural illustrating the pictures made by children.
At night the ceramic road becomes sparkling in the light of thousands of traveling cars and motorbikes.
Nguyen Thu Thuy (1st right) and foreign painters work together at a workshop in Bat Trang Village.
Representatives of Hanoi City and UNESCO visit the ceramic road.
The ceramic road helps create a new image for Hanoi.
After four years of implementing the project, the visually unappealing cement dike was transformed into a public work of art with colourful pieces of ceramics, the first one of this kind in Hanoi, thanks to the great efforts of dozens of Vietnamese artists, namely Pham Viet Hong Lam, Tung Ngoc, Doan Son, Nguyen Thu Thuy, Bui Viet Doan and 15 artists from 10 countries such as Michacel Geertsen (Denmark), Dominique de Miscaut (France), Joe Breman and Jole Bennett (the US), Civitulic, Bobio and Ci.dania (Argentina), etc. The ceramic work created by foreign artists has made contributions to creating the cultural beauty of the artwork and become the symbol of cultural co-operation among countries. Via the project's website, hundreds of pottery artists and painters around the world responded to the project by sending their artistic bricks or sketches that imbued the mural with diverse artistic imprints of different lands in the world and famous Vietnamese pottery villages such as Bat Trang, Chu Dau, Phu Lang, Binh Duong, Vinh Long, Bau Truc, etc.
"The Pottery Road along the Red River" consists of 21 sections with different themes, such as upholding the artistic heritage of ancestors via the language of motifs and patterns along the flow of history from the era of Dong Son to the dynasties of Ly, Tran, Le and Nguyen; typical designs on brocade and architectural decorations of 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups; pottery artworks by Vietnamese and international children with the theme "Hanoi – The City for Peace"; and contemporary pottery paintings of Vietnamese and international painters. Particularly, the images of Hanoi in the late 18th century and the early 19th century were re-produced on big pottery pillars (50-60cm in diameter and 1.8m in height), which was considered a successful experiment. Being baked at the temperature of 1,2000C, the photos become everlasting, being able to endure the harsh weather of Hanoi. It is a piece of artwork of great significance, helping preserve the historical image of Hanoi.
On August 30, 2008 the "Pottery Road along the Red River" project was awarded the Prize "Bui Xuan Phai - For the Love of Hanoi", a great award reserved the projects which are significant to Hanoi. The Road is nearly 4,000m long and has an acreage of 7,000m2, stretching from An Duong to Van Kiep Roads. It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest pottery road in the world.
By Hoang Quang Ha


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Linda Janssen
Articles/Essays
Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. The Benefits of Bilingualism: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter. New York Times Sunday Review, Mar. 17, 2012.
Brody, Jane E. At Every Age, Feeling the Effects of Too Little Sleep. New York Times, Oct. 23, 2007.
Brody, Jane E. A Good Night's Sleep Isn't a Luxury – It's a Necessity. New York Times, May 30, 2011.
Chan, Amanda L. Mindfulness Meditation Benefits: Twenty Reasons Why It's Good for Your Mental and Physical Health. The Huffington Post online.
Connor, Kathryn M., MD. Assessment of Resilience in the Aftermath of Trauma. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 2006; 67 (suppl 2): 46-49.
Copeland, Anne P. and Marissa Lombardi. In Their Own Voice: Intercultural Meaning in Everyday Stories. The Interchange Institute, 2011.
Coutu, Diane L. How Resilience Works. Harvard Business Review, May 2002.
Coutu, Diane L. How Resilience Works: Improvising Your Way Out of Trouble. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Aug. 26, 2002.
Ernst & Young's Globalization Report. Looking Beyond the Obvious: Globalization and New Opportunities for Growth. Released Jan. 2013.
Grappo, Rebecca. Building Resiliency in Global Nomads. US Foreign Service Journal, December 2008; 76.
Grappo, Rebecca. Promoting Your Child's Emotional Health. US Foreign Service Journal, June 2011; 73.
Hofstede, Geert. Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture (International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology), 2(1) Article 8, 2011.
Jha, Alok. Being Bilingual May Delay Alzheimer's and Boost Brain Power. The Guardian, Feb. 18, 2011.
Johnson, James P., Lenartowicz T., Apud, S. Academy of International Business. Journal of International Business Studies, 2006
Lambiri, Vicki. TCKs Come of Age. March, 2005.
McCaig, Norma M. Growing Up With a World View: Nomad Children Develop Multi-Cultural Skills. US Foreign Service Journal, September 1994, 32.
Petriglieri, Gianpiero. Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots. Harvard Business Review online, Oct. 3, 2012.
Quick, Tina L. The Four Pearls of Successful University Transition. Expatarrivals.com.
Schaetti, Barbara. Phoenix Rising: A Question of Cultural Identity. Strangers at Home: Essays on the Effects of Living Overseas and Coming 'Home' to a Strange Land. Carolyn D. Smith, ed. Aletheia Publications, 1996. Link to an adapted version of the essay here: http://www.transition-dynamics.com/phoenix.html
Adventures in Expat Land
Home or Away?
Expat Authors & Others: Evelyn Simpson + Louise Wiles, Part II
C is for Committed
Expat Authors & Others: Evelyn Simpson + Louise Wiles, Part I
Feeding the Creative Beast
Tipping Post
The Short and the Long of It
Dangly Bits All Covered Up
The topic of emotional resiliency is near and dear to my own heart, and in The Emotionally Resilient Expat: Engage, Adapt and Thrive Across Cultures, Janssen has written a comprehensive guide to help expats navigate the multiple challenges and stresses that come with living overseas. Reading this will help parents to become more aware of the experiences their children and adolescents might face, and find tools that will help their families to become more resilient. School personnel and therapists who work with Third Culture Kids will also benefit from reading this book if they want to truly understand the joys, as well as the tribulations, of life outside one's home culture and country.
Rebecca Grappohttp://rnginternational.com
Janssen skillfully weaves her own thoughts and experiences with those who have lived, loved and studied all facets of the expatriate life. With this book, which should be packed in the suitcase of anyone heading to that vast unknown, Expatland, the chances of becoming The Emotionally Resilient Expat will be significantly increased.
Apple GidleyAuthor, Expat Life Slice by Slice
The original premise of this book, even the need for this book, comes from our time in history. We are today a world which is indeed global and wanting to be resilient, happy, and engaged. Linda A. Janssen reminds us we can maintain, enhance, restore and renew our levels of resiliency. It may take time, effort, energy, persistence and mindful attention, but it is possible. We can only look forward to more from her.
Julia SimensEmotional Resilience and the Expat Child
© The Emotionally Resilient Expat :: Linda Janssen. Styled by Lemonberry.com


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Q: Open problems in General Relativity I would like to know if there are some open mathematical problems in General Relativity, that are important from the point of view of Physics. I mean is there something that still needs to be justified mathematically in order to have solid foundations? Please tell me.
Thanks!
Edit: The same question was asked (and answered from a mathematical perspective) on math.SE.

A: General relativity has extremely solid foundations.  Every experiment testing it has confirmed its predictions to great precision.  For example, recent measurments of binary systems have confirmed the precise energy loss from the system that GR predicts from gravity wave radiation (in the Jupiter-Sun system the predicted loss of energy at a rate of a 40 watt bulb is impossible to measure accurately since the effect is so small).  Predictions regarding gravitational impacts on the passage of time, the bending of light around massive objects, and frame dragging, for example, have also been confirmed with high preceision.
Like quantum chromodynamics (the mathematical physics of the strong force that binds atomic nuclei), the math of GR is not particularly easy to apply numerically in systems that are not highly stylized with assumptions include to simplify the calculations.  It is fair to say that all of the mathematically easy cases of the implications of GR have been well explored, but that there are plenty of possible physical systems for which we do not have good numerical theoretical predictions - only approximations informed by analytical insights drawn from an understanding of the equations.
Thus, there are many theoretical predictions of GR that have not been experimentally tested because no one has done the math to make the prediction yet.  In practice, a fair amount of the computer programs used to simulate gravitational mechanics at levels smaller than the entire universe and outside the immediate vicinity of very dense objects like black holes and neutron stars use a Newtonian gravity approximation.
The equations of quantum mechanics are formulated on a Minkowski background that includes special relativity but not general relativity.  Usually this produces very little conflict - GR is generally applied to dynamics on a scale where quantum mechanical effects have little impact; QM is usually applied in circumstances where gravity is negligible relative to the effects of other forces.  In the few circumstances where there is good reason to think that both GR and QM could have measurable impacts (e.g. in the early Big Bang and around black holes) there have been some ad hoc efforts by Bekenstein, Hawking and others to consider the effects of both, but there is no consensus means of formulating QM in a way that fully respects GR (or visa versa) in general.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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S03E17 - Derrel Sims // The Alien Hunter
Lost Origins
Have you ever seen a UFO or had an extraterrestrial experience? Millions of alien abductions have been reported and the worldwide phenomenon continues to baffle skeptics and open minds alike. In today's episode of Lost Origins, Andrew and CK connect with Derrel Sims to discuss his life's work around the investigation of extraterrestrial abductions, implants, and everything in between.
More than forty years ago, Derrel Sims had his first encounter with an alien presence. At the age of 17, he ... See More experienced a malignant contact with these alien beings that would alter his life forever. As a result of the violent encounter, Derrel made the decision that he would no longer willingly be a victim to the bizarre quests of alien entities. He was determined to change his role in life from being "the hunted" to "the hunter." When these same beings later came for his 5-year-old son, Derrel put his hunt into high gear.
Derrel began preparing himself for his lifelong quest of pursuing the alien prey. Every path he took would equip him mentally, physically and spiritually to become a warrior for the cause and to assume the role he feels he was born to play. As a result, Derrel has spent the past three decades researching the world of alien beings. His focus has been two-fold: To acquire the skills necessary to design and implement a program of compassionate and effective counseling for victims of alien contact, and to collect and analyze medical and scientific evidence of the alien presence. He has spent years studying and training in a broad range of areas that would provide him with a full array of skills necessary to search for and acquire evidence of these creatures.
He served in military intelligence and worked with the CIA, and after the service worked as a police officer, and as a licensed private investigator. As a teenager, he was gifted at martial arts and became an instructor—though he himself had no formal training. As an adult, he kept several exotic animals, including a tiger and pet python. From advanced scuba diving training to skill with weaponry; from his certifications as a Master Hypnotherapist and Certified Medical Hypnoanaesthesiolgist to studies in graphoanlysis; Derrel's eclectic accomplishments have had a single aim: to defeat the alien menace.
2 years ago #alienabduction, #alienabductions, #alienhunter, #alienimplants, #aliens, #alientechnology, #cia, #conspiracy, #conspiracytheory, #derrelsims, #extraterrestrial, #extraterrestrials, #impants, #mufon, #mystery, #ufo, #ufos, #whistleblower


Welcome to part 2 of our series 'Snapchat Influencer Q&A' where you can learn from the masters as we deconstruct the techniques and strategies used by Snapchat influencers.
Today, Justin Wu was kind enough to take the time to share his knowledge and experience that he has gained from using Snapchat to grow both his personal brand and his business.
Justin is the Founder of Growth.ly, a growth marketing company that is designed to help you get convert more traffic and implement growth systems. He started getting serious about Snapchat earlier this year and he is here today to share the valuable tips he learned along the way.
In the interview, Justin shares his thoughts about the future of Snapchat marketing, his tips for becoming a Snapchat influencer, why takeovers are so effective and much more.
Hey Justin great to meet you, thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge and tips with us. When did you realize the potential of Snapchat for business and when did you get serious about it?
I realized Snapchat was for business when GaryVee pushed it really hard in February this year.
Also DJ Khaled was a turning point. He got more people to look at Snapchat, which then brought in celebrities and their fans which helped the app explode in popularity.
What do you think about the future of the Snapchat as a marketing tool?
Snapchat is a strong branding & communication tool. ROI isn't direct and it takes a lot of work to get it done right.
It's not for every brand or business. It requires a personality and value to add to audiences which weeds a lot of marketers out.
A lot of marketers want to grow their Snapchat but find it hard to get in front of the camera. Did you have trouble with this? If so how did you overcome it?
Definitely. Hardest thing about Snapchat is that its real. A lot of marketers find this a challenge to create content live. Typical marketers repost, write or edit videos. Its not a medium for everyone because you also have to be what you say — not only regurgitate.
Initially it took me 2-3 hours to do a 10-15 min Snapstorm. I'm an introvert and talking to a camera/people is foreign to me. I just decided to overcome it through brute force and by just doing it. I snapped every single day to become better at it. Kept asking for feedback on how I can improve my snaps and speech.
What impact has Snapchat had on your business/personal brand?
Before Snapchat I hadn't really made a big push on my own personal brand. With it, I've been able to grow it rapidly because it allows me to point and shoot video very fast.
Snapchat is doing what old Twitter use to. I can post what I'm doing and get reactions. I can say that I'm traveling in NYC and meet 8 people from Snapchat. It's helped me get my message out for people to view.
Is Snapchat part of your growth strategy at Growth.ly or are you focusing on using it for your personal brand?
Snapchat is a strategy to grow both Growth.ly and my personal brand. The heavy focus is my personal brand, where I can drop daily content and 'jab' people with interesting value snapstorms. Right hooks occasionally come when I want to ask for business.
My goal however isn't really to monetize my Snapchat, but to build up a strong brand and followers first. Those looking to get direct or instant ROI will find it challenging and their content might be too salesy for audiences. For me, I generate revenue outside my own personal brand and so it's allowed me to be more free on the content instead of treating the content as my main marketing funnel/sales.
It's about building engaged audiences & relationships that I wouldn't have met otherwise. Business opportunities will come with that.
What tips would you give to someone who is just starting to grow their business/personal brand on Snapchat?
Figure out your content strategy & calendar. Snapchat takes a lot of time and energy to create. The more prepared you are, then it'll help you knock snapchat out fast.
Another tip is to collaborate. Find those within your space – and reach out to them. If they give you shoutouts or you collaborate a takeover – you both win.
I've been enjoying your Snapchat takeovers recently. What's your goal with taking part in account takeovers?
I can introduce awesome people to my audience that provide value.
Growth: We both trade audiences and grow our following. This is a fast way to gain audiences for each other .
Connections with other Influencers: I can start connecting with other influencers and find a common conversation point by trading takeover accounts.
I made a connection with some awesome people within the industry because of it. I know that there are others who are 'big' on other social platforms. Snapchat is still new and most don't have large audiences. If I'm large on Snapchat, its easy to connect with another big name trying to make it in SC. It also helps establish social proof.
Content Addition: Creating content 7 days a week is tough. Takeovers can help provide interesting content and take a day break for you.
While Snapchat is very strong platform, don't forget about others like Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and more. Each channel has it's strengths and respect each of them to win.
Thanks again Justin for taking the time to share your thoughts on Snapchat. To connect with Justin Wu you can add him on Snapchat @hackapreneur or by scanning the snapcode.
Read the first part of the Snapchat Influencer Q&A series with Erica Blair here.


Jewlea was born and raised in Hatfield, AR. She graduated from Rich Mountain Community College with an Associates Degree in General Studies, while working in the Loan Department at Union Bank in Mena, AR. She recently transplanted herself into Central Arkansas, to live closer to family. She began working with Next Generation in February 2016, and has been a huge addition to the team. Outside of work, Jewlea spends her free time being with family, friends, and her dog, Abby. Outside of that, she has a passion for exercise and knitting.


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He outed a source. She committed suicide. Then ESPN apologized
On January 22, 2014 By broadsideblogIn behavior, blogging, business, culture, journalism, Media, news, women, work
Have you been following this?
A writer named Caleb Hannan profiled the inventor of a "magic putter" named Essay Anne Vanderbilt for an ESPN-owned website called Grantland.
Here is the story he wrote.
As he dug into the story over seven months, it became clear she was hiding something from him. He discovered that she was transgender, and outed her to one of her investors.
She committed suicide.
It has prompted a firestorm — among writers, editors, bloggers and armchair ethicists — over how this story was (mis)handled.
Here's one analysis of the piece and its aftermath.
And another, from Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress:
one of the best reasons for large journalistic organizations to hire staff with a broad range of life experience and expertise, and to treat those perspectives as if they're valuable and deserve deference, is so someone's present to step in when a piece fails, to educate the writer in question, and to save subjects of pieces from journalistic malpractice, and publications from damaging themselves…
It's hard to consider better evidence of the value of having staff with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives–and of the willingness to go outside your own staff when they reach the limits of their wisdom. Doing this takes humility, and it takes curiosity, an acknowledgement that your own knowledge is not the sum of the world, and a voracious hunger to understand more of it. These are the basic qualities of good journalism. It's remarkable that so many news organizations fail to apply them to considering the mix of their own staff and contributors.
Here's a smart post from a friend, colleague and another veteran sportswriter, Vivian Bernstein:
I was once assigned to write a feature story on a high profile, nationally known professional athlete who kept getting into trouble. What was wrong with this guy? I talked to former coaches and anyone in his hometown who knew him back when the athlete was in high school.
Through that reporting, I learned a shocking family secret.
The athlete's mother had attempted suicide back around the time he was becoming a local star with a big future. Not only that, but it was the athlete who had actually found his mother following the attempt.
The information may have shed some light on why this athlete had been so troubled. It also turned what was going to be a good feature into a great story.
But before I published it I wanted to find out something about this woman who was not a public figure and was about to have her personal agony exposed. That was a problem because I was not able to interview her. The athlete was refusing all media requests at the time, too.
So I tracked down the brother of the athlete and I asked him the one question I needed an answer to before writing this story:
Would revealing his mother's secret cause so much anguish that she might consider suicide again?
Maybe, he said. And he implored me not to write it.
I thought about what greater public good would come from revealing the truth. Would it help others? Would it prevent a crime? Would it save lives? Was there any redeeming Fourth Estate journalistic purpose at all? We're not talking Pentagon Papers here.
No. It would only make me look good for scooping the competition and drawing readers. And it would have been a hell of an ego boost.
I never wrote it. I have kept that secret to this day.
Like Viv, I've had a long career in journalism. Like Viv, I've also heard a few shocking secrets, and had sources plead with me to keep them in the closet. I did. No question about it. I never discussed it with an editor or coworker or colleague or friend. I knew what to do (how would I feel if it were me?) and behaved accordingly.
There's another element to this story that pissed me off, and, yes, because it's people like me and Viv — veterans of decades of smart, thoughtful, accurate journalism — have been shoved for good out of beloved newsroom jobs. We're considered old and expensive; 24,000 journalists were fired in 2008 alone.
Here's Bill Simmons, the editor of the Hannan story and part of his apology:
Another reason we created Grantland: to find young writers we liked, bring them into the fold, make them better, maybe even see if we could become the place they remembered someday when someone asked them, "So what was your big break?" That matters to us. Just about every writer we have is under 40 years old. Many of them are under 30. I am our third-oldest writer, as crazy as that sounds. For us, 31-year-old Caleb Hannan had (and has) a chance to be one of those writers. That's why it hurts so much that we failed him.
There's a really smart reason that some journalism organizations still keep and value those with decades in the trenches — who have made mistakes, learned from them and now teach others not to do the same damn thing.
It's called institutional knowledge.
No matter how whip-smart or ambitious a 31-year-old might be, or a brilliant 23-year-old, they haven't been around the block a few times. They've barely found the block — the place every ambitious writer reaches — where difficult, challenging, complicated stories demand a lot of smart, tough thinking from people who already done a lot of that.
Without smart, tough, wise editors — willing to think broadly, deeply, inclusively and incisively — we're all screwed.
Bill SimmonsCaleb HannanESPNEssay Anne VanderbiltethicsGolfGrantlandJournalismJournalistmagic putterputterReporterreportingtransgenderwriterwriting
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24 thoughts on "He outed a source. She committed suicide. Then ESPN apologized"
Linda Marsa
Gosh, Caitlin, I couldn't have said is better. That way my first reaction when I read about this–no adult supervision. Everyone has skeletons in their closet. It is our job to ferret them out when it is in the public's interest. But not when it causes suicidal anguish and is of no benefit other than to make the reporter look good. Well said.
Thanks! That means a lot from you…pls feel free to repost or tweet…:-)
i hadn't been following this story, but am horrified. It's very sad what is being lost by substituting supposedly more glamorous (and cheap) youth over experience. Keep shedding this kind of light on these issues Caitlin and I hope those in charge of hiring are listening…
I hope, too. But they're not.
I now work for editors who are 95% of the time half my age. They may be smart but they have, de facto, a hell of a lot less experience and also wield tremendous power over my work and reputation. Not cool.
Thanks for this. I read the piece on Dr. V last week and my first thought was: "WTF, did this writer just out a transwoman?" My second was: "Where the hell were the editors on this?"
And then I read your post here and my third thought was: "Damn. Institutional knowledge goes a long way. We seem to be losing a lot of that."
Hey, good to hear from you again!
I think many of us old folks — people over 40 who actually do journalism, still (!) — are as horrified. There's a lot to be learned from this debacle, but I highly doubt much will change as a result of this.
We have a large firm over here that tends to employ the older person. There has to be a reason for this. Quite right, they're taken n because of their maturity, because of their interaction with members of the public, because of their knowledge gleaned over a lifetime.
This would apply equally well to editors of newspapers and magazines. It all well and good hiring the young for their energy but they have no life experience to apply to situations they may face.
I'm disgusted that this happened but more so that it was allowed to happen. Guidance needs to be given to young go-getters as to what is in the public domain and what should remain sacrosanct. An older head would likely have seen this.
But the older heads are mostly gone, hence the problem.
ksbeth
what a sad outcome, and what you say is so true. no matter what you've learned in school, or how many journo classes you may have passed, there is no comparison to life experience and age and time in the field. this is where ethics, empathy and the nuances of life and the art of reporting are all developed over time and where these skills are honed. it is a sad loss to the industry.
Ethical decision making is one of the most difficult and important parts of this job. People who do it poorly can face some serious consequences.
It disturbs me that a journalist would go to such lengths to out someone's sexual status or orientation for a news story, especially since this person isn't a celebrity in movies or music or whatever. If you ask me, it shows someone without many morals. I hope he feels remorse later on.
The larger issue — not that you want to read all those links I included with the details — is that journalism is a team sport; that story was read by 15 (!) other Grantland staffers **before** it hit print.
The writer is never wholly cuplable. The writer had editors and plenty of them, to change things before that point — or just spike (i.e. kill) the story.
Fifteen? Holy crap on a stick, didn't anyone stop and say that this was a bad idea?
Not loudly enough, it seems. There is a lot of groupthink in journalism.
I think I've seen a few scary TV shows and movies involving groupthink. Here it is in real life, and it's just as scary as its fictional counterparts.
CRGardenJoe
A journalist must always make decisions about what to pass on and what not to pass on. Event though the ethos is to gather information and let the editor decide, I don't think you can be fully human and function over time if you you don't also sometimes have a heart. I recall about 25 years ago covering a suicide at a local high school–a student had shot himself in an English class–and how many reporters converged on the parking lot of the school and interviewed students as they were leaving. I was a young father at the time myself, and couldn't do it–could not bring myself to question kids leaving school after an event like that. So I went into the school itself and happened to catch the superintendent of the district as he was returning–from visiting the family of the boy who had killed himself. I introduced myself as a reporter, and his first question was: "where you one of the reporters who was questioning students as they left school?" I could honestly say "no." And ended up with an exclusive interview with the only school official who had been directly in contact with the family. Anyway, you're pretty much right on all counts–there is nothing that substitutes for experience, and start-up operations that want to be "trendy" often would benefit from some employees with grey hairs.
I really appreciate you sharing this…it's one thing to opine from a safe distance and another to be in the middle of a story and making, on the spot with no direction, decisions like that one. I have managed to avoid a lot of GA work and the sort of scrum/stakeout/pack journalism this encourages and rewards, and that sort of behavior makes me embarrassed and ashamed to be a journalist. It's why I've almost always chosen to write features…to avoid those scenarios.
I did once have to interview the father of a soldier, one of a dozen killed in Afghanistan when their helicopter fell (!?) off a mountaintop. The man was so gracious and calm and it was heartbreaking to hear (by phone).
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I've been following it and like a lot of people, I found it totally appalling. It reminded me of something I said when I was in journalism school – that being a good journalist should never come at the expense of being a good person – and while a lot of what I said when I was in school was fueled by that specific kind of arrogance fueled by inexperience, this is one thing I still believe in wholeheartedly.
The rest of your post – about the loss of institutional knowledge and experience in newsrooms – hits at the heart of conversations I have with two of my coworkers (both former newspaper guys in their middle years) every day. I don't want to say too much because, you know, digital breadcrumbs, but I'll say your observations mirror those of my colleagues, and we all feel the profession is much, much poorer because of it.
Love that…"digital breadcrumbs." 🙂
One of the many things I haven't blogged about much (yet) is journalism ethics, as every one of us makes decisions almost daily about how to behave with sources. Yet we almost NEVER talk about it to anyone else, which is bizarre and stressful and leads to crappy decisions as well.
I'm really lucky that my husband is a 30 yr NYT veteran (and Pulitzer team winner) so he totally gets why we do what we do and in what spirit. The NYT also has a truly Draconian ethics code every freelancer has to sign. I resent it, but it's also smart.
Almost all my work now is assigned by people half my age. For fuck's sake. It drives me nuts. I need great editing, too, and few 25 yr olds have the skills and experience (how cld they?!) to offer it.
themodernidiot
Grantland's a hack shop. Ripped off NYT's Snowfall piece. Plain and simple the reporter's an asshat that deserved to get fired and blackballed, so he'd have plenty of time to sit around and think about what he did. What a dick move.
Ah, but…the reporter had plenty of editors whose JOB it is to backstop/edit/re-direct. So, yes, asshat, but the editor's job is to forestall asshattery.
Ooooh, I like that word. 🙂
And good to have you back in the rantosphere.
Be credulous how you pronounce asshattery or people will think you're asking for the WC lol


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Royal Court gets £860k Lottery windfall
First phase of £10m scheme to start in February
Published on December 2nd 2011.
THE Royal Court Liverpool Trust has today announced that it is to receive £867,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund. This money means that the first phase of the £10.6m scheme to refurbish the building will begin on 1 February 2012.
The Royal Court, which in recent times has produced a whole series of "scouse" themed comedies for "a local audience that had not been catered for at other venues" has seen just a couple of production runs this year.
The planIt describes the money as "a great boost for the average person on the street, as well as the city as a whole", while a whole host of notables, including Sir Terry Leahy, Judi Dench and Cherie Booth QC, have been lined up to comment on the news with a figurative three cheers.
Gillian Miller, founder and chief executive of the Royal Court Liverpool Trust says: "It's a great honour to be able to head up the campaign to renovate one of the city's best loved buildings. This grant and vote of confidence from such a nationally important body as the Heritage Lottery Fund means that we can begin to turn our plans for the building into reality."
She added: "We now need to make sure that we get it right for all those who are served by the building. From the older members of our community who enjoy the Royal Variety Lunch Club to the young people who take part in our annual Access All Areas project".
The trust says it has committed to using local firms wherever possible in the renovation scheme and Paul Monoghan, the architect who has drawn up the plans was raised and educated in the city.
A £1 ticket levy was introduced in March 2010 on all tickets to shows at the Royal Court. This has raised over £200,000 to date which has been used as match funding for the Trust's second round Heritage Lottery application. The scheme will be phased to ensure that the theatre does not close to audiences for any longer than a few months at a time.
Great and good quotes from the great and the...
Dame Judi Dench CH DBE, Patron of the Royal Court Trust says: "The Royal Court is one of our best loved regional theatres and especially dear to me. I made my stage debut here as Ophelia in the 50s and it was a wonderful experience."
Judi Dench As OpheliaSir Terry Leahy: "'This is good news indeed for the Royal Court Theatre, for Liverpool and the North West Region. There is no doubt that the Heritage Lottery Fund support will help to unlock future funds to ensure that the theatre is completely renovated."
Cherie Booth QC, Campaign Ambassador: "This is fantastic news. The Royal Court means such a lot to the people of Liverpool. When I went to a production last year, I was delighted to see it so full of people enjoying a fantastic evening wholly produced in Liverpool. This grant will make sure that the building now receives some of the care and attention it so deserves and ensure that generations to come can enjoy the wonderful Royal Court Theatre. Well done to everyone involved!"
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Congratulations to Professor Alastair Compston on being appointed CBE
Cambridge Neuroscience wish to congratulate Professor Alastair Compston who was recognised in the New Year's honours list.
Professor of Neurology Alastair Compston was appointed CBE 'for services to multiple sclerosis treatment'. Compston has been involved with research on the mechanisms and treatment of multiple sclerosis since 1976, the last 26 years based in Cambridge. Apart from work identifying many genetic risk variants for susceptibility to the disease, he has introduced Alemtuzumab (Lemtrada) as a highly effective treatment for early relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Since 2013, Alemtuzumab has been licensed throughout the world and is now used increasingly as a first-line therapy in young adults with this potentially disabling condition. Compston, a Fellow of Jesus College, said: "I am delighted to receive this honour but especially pleased that the citation recognises the work of a large research community, in Cambridge and elsewhere, that has transformed the outlook for young people with multiple sclerosis facing an otherwise uncertain future."
For more on Cambridge Academics recognised over the New Year see here.
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Until very recently, when a child was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis, doctors couldn't give worried families very much concrete information about their child's prognosis. There were only a handful of large-scale studies on juvenile arthritis outcomes and most of them are now outdated because they included children who were diagnosed before the introduction of new treatments.
A new study in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases has changed all of that. Using data from a five-year national study, lead author Dr. Jaime Guzman and colleagues found that the typical course of care for JIA is so effective that within two years of diagnosis more than three out of four children no longer had any swollen joints.
Dr. Guzman is a CFRI scientist, a staff rheumatologist at BC Children's Hospital, and a Clinical Associate Professor with the UBC Faculty of Medicine.
Unless they suffered from polyarthritis, a severe type of JIA in which more than five joints are affected, patients had a 50 per cent chance of going into remission within five years of diagnosis. Even children with RF-Positive polyarthritis, the most difficult type of JIA to treat, had a 90 per cent chance of experiencing at least one period where their disease was inactive within five years.
The paper uses data from the Research on Arthritis in Canadian Children Emphasizing Outcomes (ReACCh-Out) cohort study, which followed 1,104 children newly diagnosed with JIA from 2005 to 2010 at all paediatric rheumatology centres in Canada. Dr. Lori Tucker is a principal investigator for the ReACCh-Out cohort. Scientists across Canada are currently analyzing the ReACCh-Out Cohort data to gain new insights into how JIA progresses and the best ways to treat it.
Dr. Tucker is a CFRI Clinical Investigator, a pediatric rheumatologist at BC Children's and a Clinical Associate Professor with the UBC Division of Rheumatology.
This study was funded by a New Emerging Team research grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.


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Port & Starboard Donates Modern, Interactive New Website to ViBe Creative District
Virginia Beach's arts and cultural hub is now accessible at your fingertips and on the go. The ViBe Creative District has dynamic new look and feel to its web presence, thanks to an in-kind donation by local technology consulting and web design company Port & Starboard. "As a business, we feel so fortunate to be located in the ViBe, and we wanted their new website to be a valuable resource for the local community. At the same time, the design reflects the energy, creativity, and vibrancy of the people who work and play here," said Lisa DeNoia, co-founder of Port & Starboard and president of the Friends of the ViBe Creative District.
Greater interactivity is a key component of the new web design, which is mobile responsive. Business members of the ViBe Creative District now have the flexibility to create and maintain their own events on the platform. Community art, including all murals and the crosswalks, have been extensively catalogued, making it intuitive for users to browse and to identify the many works beautifying the neighborhood. Since the district was established in 2015, over 40 new businesses have opened and more than 150 artworks have been added to the sidewalks, streets, parks and walls increasing the need to catalogue and publicly share this information online.
"We have seen growing pedestrian traffic and larger groups coming to the ViBe District with phones in hand, searching for the art," said Kate Pittman, executive director of the ViBe Creative District nonprofit. "Already, more than 130,000 people have accessed our online Google Mural Map, which told us we needed to increase the art presence on our website and make it as user-friendly as possible. Now both our membership and our patrons can benefit with the resources available at vibecreativedistrict.org."
The newly launched website makes it easier than ever to get involved in the exciting work that the ViBe Creative District is doing. Individuals and business owners who wish to become members of the Friends of the ViBe Creative District can now apply online. The non-profit is now able to accept one-time and recurring monthly online donations, which help support the ViBe Creative District's mission, "to promote, support, connect, and inspire the arts and creative industries to boost our local economy, grow jobs, and enhance our quality of life."
"It is critical for non-profits to empower people to easily donate," DeNoia said. "Providing this capability on the new website is a big step in supporting the efforts the ViBe is taking on behalf of our community".
Additionally, the new website's news page features over 450 press articles in chronological order to archive the history of the arts district and cross-promote entrepreneurial business information with the community arts projects. "The ViBe District has earned 450 press mentioned in the last four years, demonstrating that the community wants to hear about and access information about their local creative community," said Pittman.
About Port & Starboard:
Port & Starboard was established in 2015 and is based in the ViBe Creative District at the Virginia Beach oceanfront. The growing technology firm provides Salesforce platform support services, web design, and expert consulting services to companies in Hampton Roads and throughout the country. Looking to enhance your web presence or digital strategy? Contact us today!
About the ViBe Creative District Nonprofit:
The ViBe Creative District nonprofit is a 501c3 that exists to promote, support, connect, and inspire the creative industries to boost our local economy, grow jobs, and enhance our quality of life. It works to create and revive economic vibrancy in our neighborhood with a remarkable local vibe. Additionally, ViBe strives to enhance a place of discovery for locals and visitors along with economic vitality to meet the City of Virginia Beach's vision for a quality resort destination. For more information on us please visit ViBeCreativeDistrict.org, email info@ViBeCreativeDistrict.org, call 757-202-9533, or follow ViBe Creative District on Facebook at and Instagram.
Lisa DeNoia
Lisa is an innovative technology leader for high-growth enterprises across various industries. She specializes in business process optimization/automation, IT systems consolidation and IT cost savings analysis, as well as Salesforce platform implementation services, solution architecture, design, development and systems integration.
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