PZ Myers had an interesting post on a topic that I have long been intrigued by and that is how when breeders selectively bred silver foxes purely on the basis of a trait by which they are more tolerant towards humans, the animals change physically too, such as their ears becoming more floppy and their snouts shorter, similar to the way that we believe that wolves in the wild evolved to become the dogs we now have.
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Ryan Deveraux of The Intercept describes what happened the day that he and another reporter were picked up and arrested by heavily armed police driving around in armored cars as they were covering the protests. It is a riveting account. If this can happen to two white journalists, one can imagine what might happen to young black men.
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Another football season is about to start and we have the Washington DC football team owner continuing to stick with its current deplorable name despite increasing disapproval and the decision by some reporters and media outlets to refuse to use it. I hope that this football team, like my hometown Cleveland Indians whose racist logo is also contemptible, lose every single game or at the least, never make the playoffs. At the moment, the Indians are well on the way to another season of well-deserved mediocrity and I couldn’t be happier.
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Now that David Gregory has been fired from his job as host of the NBC Sunday morning talk show, there have been many reasons given for why his show was awful and advice to his successor Chuck Todd on how to turn things around (see here and here). None of them will work because the underlying problem is structural and tinkering with the host and format will not help.
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I have not read her new book A Fighting Chance and likely will not do so. This is not because I do not want to but there are too many other books on my list at the moment. But I was interested in what she might have said and was pleased to find that reader Jeff (aka Hyphenman) has read it and posted an interesting review of it on his blog.
While the content of the revelations by Edward Snowden of NSA and CIA spying were disturbing, the poor quality of the internal memos and PowerPoint slides also brought the agencies some ridicule. It turns out that these agencies actually pay quite a bit of attention to style and have produced internal guides on how to write clearly and make good presentations and the style guides have now been released under Freedom of Information requests.
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Among many news watchers, the venerable CBS News program 60 Minutes is seen as a hard-hitting investigative show. I was never overly impressed with it and never watch it unless I am pointed to a segment for some reason or other. A real investigative reporter Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity that produces some excellent news stories and whose work I have long admired, recounts his own story of being hired as a producer on that show and also working at ABC News.
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I have long since ceased to be surprised that some of the best analyses of hot-button issues like what happened in Ferguson is coming from comedy shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and now with newcomer Last Week Tonight. Oliver provides valuable context and background information on what transpired and brilliantly leavens the dark matter with humor.
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As travel becomes easier and local communities across the world become increasingly diverse, the chances of marriages between people of different religions also increases. In the US alone, interfaith marriages have increased from 20% in 1950 to 45% today. For people in such marriages seeking common ground, values matter more than beliefs.
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Margot Adler died recently at the age of 68. She was one of the NPR reporters I liked to listen to. She mostly worked on feature items about people and her stories reflected an affinity for those on the margins, the outsiders, those different from the mainstream, trying to understand them and make the rest of us aware of their point of view.
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