Links and commentary on media, politics and culture by Steve Rhodes.

 

Carl Hiaasen has a piece in the New York Times' series of writers on writing (free registration required). Hiaasen is the author of many novels including Tourist Season
and Sick Puppy. He is also a columnist for the Miami Hearld. You can
read his columns from the last month or so (including several sensible ones
on Elian).
posted by steve at 4/24/2000 11:20:00 PM

 

The Wildest Ride in the South: The Angola Prison Rodeo which was nominated for an oscar in the best
short documentary category airs on http://dsc.discovery.com/>Discovery Tuesday, April 25th at 8 pm &
11 pm eastern time. Entertainment weekly gave it an A- in a http://www.ew.com/ew/tvtoday/0,2544,tue,00.html>brief review. It comes
from the same production company which did http://www.gabrielfilms.com/Farm_project_pg.html>The Farm, which is
also about Angola Prison and is available on video.




posted by steve at 4/24/2000 10:33:00 AM

 

Film Titles Offer a Peek at the Future in More Ways Than One

More TK


posted by steve at 4/22/2000 05:37:00 PM

 

A number of reporters for online sites were http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000418/tc/dot_com_clinton_2.html>part
of the press pool during Clinton's digital divide tour. Brock Meeks filed stories for MSNBC.com on Clinton's trip to East Palo Alto and
his speech at Comdex.
He also wrote about what it was like to be on the tour.
posted by steve at 4/18/2000 04:05:00 PM

 
Monday's New York Times had an http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/041700guggenheim.html>article
on Frank
Gehry's design for a new Guggenheim museum in New York City. An exhibit on the proposed building opens on Wednesday at
the Frank Loyd Wright designed Guggenheim museum.
posted by steve at 4/17/2000 09:09:00 PM

 
On Sunday and Monday,
protests are taking place against the policies of
the IMF and World Bank. Joeseph Stiglitz who was chief economist at
the World Bank from 96 til late last year and a top economic advisor to
the Clinton Administration before that has a piece in the New Republic, What I learned at the Global Economic Crisis, which is critical of the IMF.

C-SPAN is televising and streaming the rally starting at 11 am eastern on Sunday. The IMC is providing reports from grassroots media and there will also be streaming mobilization radio.

Salon has coverage including a good piece by Bruce Shapiro. The Nation has a special issue on the IMF and World Bank and is providing regular updates in their http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/>online beat column. http://www.motherjones.com/>Mother Jones has coverage and you can sign up for an email newsletter. Common Dreams has links to coverage and viewpoints.

Henry Allen who won the Pulitzer for criticism this week has a piece on the protests. David Plotz of Slate is providing http://slate.msn.com/code/ThisJustIn/ThisJustIn.asp>dispatches over the weekend. Former Village Voice reporter Jason Vest is covering the protests for Speak Out.
posted by steve at 4/15/2000 05:13:00 PM

 
The New York Post has a story, Kozmo Accused Of Avoiding Black Areas, and I'm sure there will now be more coverage since the Equal Rights Center has sued Kozmo on behalf of two residents of Washington
DC who tried to order from the company's website, but were told their zipcodes were not served according to Kozmo.com hit with lawsuit in wake of MSNBC.com probe:

 The two plaintiffs, Winona Lake who lives in the Capital Hill neighborhood in Northeast D.C. (parts of Capital Hill are also in the Southeast quadrant) and James Warren who lives in the Southwest quadrant of the city, are both African Americans who live in majority black neighborhoods that are unserved by Kozmo. Both say they tried to place an order from Kozmo’s Web site and were told the company does not serve their ZIP code.

       “I believe Southwest is a great place to live, but, unfortunately, commercial development is sorely lacking. For me, Kozmo sounded like it could be a Godsend to an area like Southwest,” Warren said in a press release. “So you can imagine my outrage when I find another business that places neighborhoods like mine on the back burner. And you can appreciate my frustration when I found out this company has the resources to expand delivery service to new cities, but won’t expand delivery to my neighborhood.”

       The suit, which extends to all residents of 12 city ZIP codes that Kozmo does not serve, is asking for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

       Berenbaum said his group would continue to investigate other cities Kozmo serves to see if the trend seen in D.C. holds. “It is our hope that consumers in other cities will join to make this a nationwide class action suit,” Berenbaum said.

posted by steve at 4/13/2000 02:34:00 PM

 
Eliot Zaret and http://www.cyberwerks.com/cyberwire/>Brock Meeks have done an investigative piece for MSNBC.com, Kozmo’s digital dividing lines. They found "that in the cities it [Kozmo] serves, the company does not offer delivery to many neighborhoods with high concentrations of black residents. The company says it only looks at Internet usage when deciding which areas to serve and says race is not a factor. But some lawyers and advocacy groups say the investigation may have exposed the first case of cyber-redlining." Donna Hoffman, an expert on ecommerce, is quoted in the piece.

New City's look at the recent limited launch of kozmo in Chicago, http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/food-2000-04-06-245.html>KOZMO.POLITAN,
says that it is currently available in the following north side zip codes -
60610, 60613, 60614,
60618, 60647 and 60657. It will be interesting to see if the MSNBC article
will have any impact on where Kozmo delivers when it expands in Chicago (as well as in other
cities).

posted by steve at 4/12/2000 02:04:00 PM

 

The Pulitzer site seems to be back up. They have a http://www.pulitzer.org/2000/2000.html>list of the winners
along links to the citations and a list of the other finalists in each category.
The finalists in the
public service category are worth reading. The Philadelphia Inquirer's
series on how the police dealt with sexual assaults was praised for the innovative presentation
on the paper's website. And the Chicago Tribune was a finalist for their
series on the failure of the death penalty in Illinois. It and the release of innocent people on death row helped lead to Gov. Ryan's decision to impose a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty.
posted by steve at 4/10/2000 02:24:00 PM

 
The winners of the Pulitzer Prize were just http://www.pulitzer.org/2000/2000.html>announced. I'm actually listening
to coverage right now on Freedom Forum's webcast.

It used to be that the only people who actually read the winners of the Pulitzers
(and other jounalism awards) after they were announced were people who picked up the reprints of the stories at journalism conferences. Now people can read them online. The Pulitzer site has the winners from 1995 -1999 in their archives and the 2000 winners will be available this summer (as I write this the Pulitzer site is hosed, so the links above may not work).

Some are already available on the web. The Washington Post has a page with links to the winners of the three awards it won including Invisable Deaths: The Fatal Neglect of D.C.'s Retarded by Katherine Boos which won for public service journalism and Kosovo photos which won for feature photography . The Village Voice
won for International Reporting for their series on AIDs in Africa by Mark Schoofs. I'm sure there are more. I'll add more links when I find them.

The American Journalism Review's April issue has an article on http://ajr.newslink.org/ajrlisaapr00.html>Journalism's Prize Culture.
Bill Dedman wrote about serving on the 1990 Pulitzer jury for the Columbia Journalism Review.
And Project Censored recently announced their http://www.projectcensored.org/cyearbook.htm>list of top censored stories for the year.


posted by steve at 4/10/2000 01:26:00 PM

 

As expected, Judge Jackson ruled that microsoft has violated
anti-trust law. You can read the opinion in http://usvms.gpo.gov/ms-conclusions.html>HTML or http://usvms.gpo.gov/ms-conclusions.pdf>PDF as well as
the earlier findings
of fact.
posted by steve at 4/03/2000 02:17:00 PM

 
Molly Steenson has an interview with
Lisa Miya-Jervis, editor of Bitch Magazine, in Maxi. I wrote an article about
Bitch three years ago (the original online version of Bitch was done by the people
who created Maxi and my piece gives some background).
posted by steve at 4/02/2000 04:03:00 PM

 
It looks like we're going to continue being in Elian http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/World/Elian_Gonzales/>overload for a while.
I did watch the diane sawyer "visit" with Elian on 20/20. It was bad enough
that she did the piece. It was even worse that she used loaded language like this
near the end of the piece:

If there’s one thing we learned from our two days with Elian, it’s this—he is not a symbol for political duels. He’s a real child who made a long, sad journey and miraculously survived. A child with the desperate need for comfort and protection, who instinctively chose a woman who could provide it. And his eyes ask a question—how can the US government enforce the law without hurting a little boy?

His eyes didn't ask that question, Sawyer imposed her viewpoint on the story.
You could just as easily argue that Elian will be hurt more in the long term by being kept from his father and grandparents.

If people were really concerned about 6 year olds like Elian, they would
work to get the US to stop the embargo

I think the This Modern World
>cartoon from Jan. 31st on it is a pretty good take on the situation. A bunch or reader responses to it were posted on the http://www.thismodernworld.com>This Modern World site.

Some PBS stations are airing Cuba: Paradox Found, the pilot for the Adventure
Divas show/website this month. It looks at the lives of a number of Cuban women.
posted by steve at 4/02/2000 02:01:00 PM

 
I realize I can just put links to articles I need to go back and read
here. Like these articles on the crisis in men's college basketball from the href=http://www.nytimes.com/library/sports/ncaabasketball/040100bkc-ncaa-troubles.html>NYT and washington post (the post link probably will only be good about two weeks). I've been watching too much of the men's and women's
NCAA tournament the last couple of weeks.
posted by steve at 4/02/2000 12:39:00 AM

 
wow, it works. I should have started a weblog a long time ago. I've been
posting weblog like items to http://www.bud.com>bud.com, a zine
Justin Hall started for nearly two years.

And I've been reading lots of weblogs - I'll add links to a bunch from this page when
I figure out how to.

The Sunday Arts section of the New York Times has articles on a couple of
filmmakers I saw speak at the Roxie in San Francisco - William Friedkin Tries Again for the A-List (he showed Sorcerer,
his remake of Wages of Fear) and Hip-Hop, How They Love Ya which focuses on James Toback (he showed Fingers). There also is an interview with
Toback in Salon. It gives a sense what it was like to hear him speak.




posted by steve at 4/02/2000 12:30:00 AM

 

test
posted by steve at 4/02/2000 12:02:00 AM