yellow journalism

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pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

It required those who held licenses to broadcast over the public airwaves to present programs on controversial issues of public importance and to present them in a way that was (in the FCC’s view) honest, equitable, and balanced. After the policy was abolished, Congress recognized that there was danger here and tried to codify the doctrine into law, but President Reagan vetoed the legislation. As a result, broadcasters were unburdened from the requirement to present balanced news coverage, and the age of yellow journalism was reborn. Chief among the early gainers were angry and opinionated baby-boomer talk jocks like Rush Limbaugh, who began engaging in political rants that charged up listeners’ amygdalae with outrage in a sort of pro wrestling of politics, attacking examples and perpetrators of the pet peeves of cultural conservatives, driving audience numbers sky-high.

To save money, newspapers began by cutting expensive endeavors like investigative reporting and specialty divisions like science. Thus, an important faculty of the nation—its ability for broad critical self-assessment and data-based reflection—was suddenly eliminated. As newspapers were grappling with obsolescence, yellow journalism spread from AM talk radio into TV with the advent of cable news. This trifecta combined to devalue the factual reporting and reason that once kept the country balanced, supplanting it with the battling opinion warlords of the new media. Having trained at postmodernist universities, many emerging leaders in journalism didn’t recognize this as a problem.

Seuss), 101–2 Lubchenco, Jane, 200, 255 Luna 2, 94 Luther, Martin, 39, 42 Lysenko, Trofim, 220, 314 M Mainstream culture, 88–90, 92–93, 99 Manhattan Project, 76–82, 94, 310 Mann, Michael, 198–99, 201–3, 204–6, 210, 213–15, 217, 238–39, 280 Mao Zedong, 220, 285–86 Marketplace of ideas, myth of, 146–48, 291, 302, 312 Marketplace of opinions, 302 May, Robert, 261 McCain, John, 8–9, 18–20, 224 McCarthy, James, 206 McCarthy, Jenny, 153 McClellan, Scott, 16 McConnell, Mitch, 224 McKee, Robert, 151, 178, 315–16 McKinley, William, 60 McNutt, Marcia, 150–51, 200, 250–51 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 63–65, 71, 166 Media antivaccine movement and, 178–79 “both sides of the story” approach and, 10–12 Buchanan’s presidential campaign and, 133–34 cable news and, 150, 208–9 churnalism and, 195, 203–5 climate change and, 194–95, 203–5 cost-cutting in, 13 Einstein and, 62 free online news and, 150–51 Jefferson and, 34 market-driven model of, 146–48 objectivity and, loss of, 10–12, 144–45 religion and, 12 science and, 10–12, 132–34 “Transgressing the Boundaries” hoax and, 130 yellow journalism and, 150–51 Medicine, 164–65 Microwave health risks, 141–42 Military advances, 74–82 Military-industrial complex, 90, 92, 99 Miller, Stanley, 106 Millikan, Robert A., 60 Milton, John, 41 Mind-body division, 43 Minnesota, 213, 240 Mohamed, Abdirahman, 154 Monckton, Lord Christopher, 3, 200, 308 Monsoons, 232 Mooney, Chris, 180–81 Morality, 295–96.


pages: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

Four days before the first installment hit the streets, Bellows messengered two copies of Wolfe’s piece to Shawn at The New Yorker’s offices with a card that read “With my compliments.” What the Tribune received in return for this gesture of good faith was a salvo. Shawn was incensed by this poisonous yellow journalism. He reeled off a letter to the Tribune’s owner, Jock Whitney, calling the piece “murderous” and “certainly libelous,” and urged the Trib’s distinguished publisher to literally stop the presses and pull the piece from the Sunday supplement. If the paper’s legal department did in fact have reason to believe that the story was legally actionable, Whitney would have to give serious thought to killing the story.

If an audience existed for well-ordered news stories written in a measured style, there was no need for a reporter to get his or her hands dirty in the muck of idle gossip and circulation-boosting stunts. By 1921, the New York Times, with a circulation of three hundred thousand (five hundred thousand for the Sunday edition), had proven that serious journalism could engage readers as effectively as yellow journalism. But the lure of the gutter is eternal. In the late nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal had supplanted Pulitzer’s World as the foremost purveyor of populist reporting, with a staff that had been poached largely from the World itself. Although the Journal’s overheated tone presaged the shrillness of supermarket tabloids, Hearst was not averse to hiring good writers who could leaven the junk with substance.

Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1992). Mills, Hilary. Mailer: A Biography (Empire Books, New York 1982). Morgan, Thomas B. (Self Creations: 13 Impersonalities Holt, (Rinehart and Winston, New York 1965). Morris, James McGrath. The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism (Fordham University Press, New York 2003). Morris, Willie. New York Days (Little, Brown, Boston 1993). Mott, Franklin Luther. American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (Macmillan, New York 1962). Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London (Secker & Warburg, London 1986). Perry, Paul.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

They include decision-making protocols that favor corporate elites and the powerful, and they are implicated in global economic and social inequality. Deep machine learning, which is using algorithms to replicate human thinking, is predicated on specific values from specific kinds of people—namely, the most powerful institutions in society and those who control them. Diana Ascher,11 in her dissertation on yellow journalism and cultural time orientation in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, found there was a stark difference between headlines generated by social media managers from the LA Times and those provided by automated, algorithmically driven software, which generated severe backlash on Twitter.

Apuzzo, M. (2015, July 22). Dylann Roof, Charleston Shooting Suspect, Is Indicted on Federal Hate Crimes. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com. Arreola, V. (2010, October 13). Latinas: We’re So Hot We Broke Google. Ms. Magazine Blog. Retrieved from www.msmagazine.com. Ascher, D. (2017). The New Yellow Journalism. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Associated Press. (2013, January 16). Calif. Teacher with Past in Porn Loses Appeal. USA Today. Retrieved from www.usatoday.com. Associated Press v. United States. (1945). 326 U.S. 1, US Supreme Court. Bagdikian, B. (1983). The Media Monopoly.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

An accompanying article, also written by Confessore, admitted that “The Times did not verify many aspects of Ms. Fenton’s claims, never interviewed her children, and did not confirm the identity of the man she described as her husband.” Her children were not even in her custody; they had either been placed in foster care or adopted. The shoddy, sometimes yellow journalism in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was just a warm-up for the unseemly haste in declaring lacrosse players at Duke University guilty of a heinous rape, which in the Times’ script reflected a pattern of white supremacy deeply embedded in American culture. In reality, it was another fraud.

Massing’s piece opened the floodgates to frustration with the Times and fed into a growing leftist campaign to accuse the media of “selling a war to the American public based on lies,” as Arianna Huffington would later write. Some went so far as to accuse the Times of having disinterred the yellow journalism of the Hearst press during the run-up to the Spanish-American War. And most fingers pointed directly at Judy Miller. In New York magazine, Kurt Andersen explained that “because her vivid, terrifying pieces appeared in the liberal Times, she arguably bears more responsibility than any other American outside government for nudging public opinion in favor of war.”


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Between 1880 and 1890 the amount of newsprint used by American newspapers increased sixfold, from just over 100 million pounds annually to almost 700 million. The growth of sensational stories and salacious gossip that filled the new column inches spread alarm among American commentators, who put it down to moral decline rather than to market forces. The approach was known in the United States as yellow journalism, possibly in reference to the color that the cheap newsprint quickly became, and grew highly influential. It has even been suggested that the sensational coverage of the sinking of the USS Maine by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal helped force the United States to start the Spanish-American War of 1898.

See plantation forestry tree forks, 90 trees characteristics of, 140–41 diseases and, 263–64 distribution of, 251–58 ecology and climate of, 140–41 exotic, 263–64 See also broad-leaved trees; conifers Tressell, Robert, 224 trestle bridges, 218 Tridacna gigas, 114–15 tropical forests colonialism and, 256–57 deforestation myths and, 247, 248 early climate change and, 28 logging, 257–58, 262 luxury woodworking and, 145 primate food sources, 9 wood variation and, 141 trullo houses, 156 truss bridges, 208, 211, 227 tumuli, 152–53 Tutankhamen, 119, 142 Uluburun Shipwreck, 109 understory trees, 141 Union Chain Bridge, 209 Upper Paleolithic, 58, 70 upright body posture, 4, 5, 25–26 urban development, 176–77, 191, 192–94, 195–96, 219 urban forestry initiatives, 272–74 Urban VIII (Pope), 159 Urnes, 125 USS Maine, 224 USS Monitor, 213 van der Woude, Ad, 175 Védrines, Jules, 236 veneers, 131, 142, 235 See also plywood Venice, 147, 165 Venus of Dolní Vestonice, 101 Vespers of 1610 (Monteverdi), 147 vessels, 140–41 Viking age, 127–29, 135 Waddington, Clive, 79 Warde, Paul, 173–74 Warren, Samuel Hazzledine, 64 Watt, James, 200 Weald, 178, 197 Wernwag, Louis, 217 Westminster Hall, 162–63 West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village, 118 Weyerhaeuser Company, 257 wheelbarrows, 116 Wheeler, Peter, 44 wheels, 110–13, 115–16, 137–38 wheelwrights, 137 Whipple, Cullen, 221 Whiting, Benjamin, xii whole-log construction, 120–23 wickerwork, 95–97 Wilkinson, John, 199, 200 Williams, Michael, 260 William the Conqueror, 127 Windsor chair, 136 Winter Gardens, Sheffield, 240 wood, mechanical properties of anisotropy, 119, 180–81, 235 clambering hypothesis of intelligence and, 12, 13 human ancestors and, 31–33 human evolutionary tools and, 60 modified wood and, 271 musical instruments and, 146 prestressing, 121–22, 122 variations in, 140 wood cellular structure, 14–15 color variations of, 141 combustion of, 36–37, 102 complex structure of, 15–16, 32, 32 joining of, 132–34, 181 onerous properties of, 206, 217 production and use of, 242 steam bending of, 135–36 supply and demand, 123, 177–78, 188, 198, 202, 246 turning of, 134–35 useful properties of, 32–33, 35–37, 42, 164–65, 217 Wood Age, 188, 201, 203, 217, 279 wood as limit to progress, 169–84 availability and, 173–74, 177–78, 254–55 craft industries and, 178–79, 219 craft traditions and, 180, 184, 196, 219 forest industries and, 177–78 harvesting and transport, 175–77, 254–55 Romans, 171–72 ships and, 169–72, 182–84, 206 structural weaknesses and, 180–84 technological stasis and, 172–73, 180, 205–6 time-consuming processes and, 179–80, 230–31 United States and, 225–26 urban development and, 176–77 wood-burning stoves, 202 wood cells, 14–15, 32, 32, 164, 223, 231, 238 wooden objects barrels, 136–37 boats, 80–83, 96–97, 106–8, 114–15, 237 bridges, 122–23, 206, 207, 217, 218 churches, 125 cups, 135 dishes, 135 doors, 132–33 furniture, 136, 142, 236, 239 huts, 52–53 longhouses, 91, 123 machine-made wood screws, 211–22 matches, 230 musical instruments, 146–49, 237 paneling, 164 pencils, 230 piles, 165 round houses, 79 sculpture, 143–45, 163 sleds, 110, 115 snowshoes, 136 technological stasis and, 118 tennis rackets, 136 toothpicks, 230 toys, 231 trackways, 191 travoises, 116 waterwheels, 200 wheelbarrows, 116 wheels, 110–13, 115–16, 137–38, 172 Woodhenge, 154–55 wood laminates (glulam), 232, 239–41, 270–71 wood pulp, 222, 223–24, 225, 241 wood rays, 111 wood technology, 80–81, 111–12 wood types Acacia, 62, 142 alder, 177 ash, 85, 94, 113, 260, 263–64 balsa, 141, 237, 257 beech, 85, 176, 177, 178, 253, 260 birch, 80, 81, 141, 237 box, 147 cedar, 109, 141, 255 chestnut, 94, 145, 260, 264 elm, 95, 128, 137, 165 Eucalyptus, 38, 262, 263, 264 fir, x, 141, 240, 255 hazel, 65, 86, 94, 95, 178, 259 hornbeam, 147 larch, 240, 264 lime, 85, 144–45, 259 mahogany, 145–46, 205 maple, 141, 142, 147 oak, 80, 85, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 107, 113, 123, 127, 128, 129, 143, 178, 179, 201, 212, 260, 263, 264, 277 palm, 156–57, 250 pine, xi-xii, xiii, 79, 82, 146, 255, 257 spruce, 66, 146, 148, 219, 255 sycamore, 144, 147 teak, 141, 256, 262 walnut, 145 yew, 64, 73, 107 woomeras, 70 World Atlatl Association, 70–71 World War, I, II, 234–35, 236, 237–38 Wrangham, Richard, 38 Wren, Christopher, 192, 193 Wright, Ted, 107 Wright, Will, 107 Wright Flyer, 234 wrought iron, 208–20 architecture and, 211–12, 219–21 boilers, 217–18 bridges and, 209, 210–11, 218 invention of, 208–9 machine tools and, 214–16 monumental structures and, 213–14 nails, 219–20 rails, 218 railways and, 209–10 replacements for, 228, 240 ships and, 212–13, 214 wood combined with, 216–18 Wyatt, Job, 221 Wyatt, William, 221 Xia Shouqing, 123 yellow journalism, 223–24 Yellow River, 248 Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, 277–78 York Minster, 161 Young, Andrew, 110 Zeeuw, Jan de, 189 Acknowledgments This book is the fruit of many years of wandering and pondering, most of all stimulated by my role as an academic at the Universities of Manchester and Hull.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

While most newspapers gushed over the outré decorations and glamorous celebrities on the guest list, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World turned its readers’ attention to the cost of the party. Who, the World asked, had paid the estimated $200,000 (or approximately $5 million in 2017 dollars) to host this ball?4 Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born newspaper publisher who perfected the art of yellow journalism, often ran eye-catching headlines atop reports of supposed scandals that, in the end, had little truth to them. His insurance stories, however, had substance. Tipped off by one of Hyde’s opponents in an ongoing battle for control of the insurance giant, Pulitzer claimed the bill for the costume party had been paid for by the insurance company.

Minnesota involved a Minnesota law that allowed the shuttering of newspapers that created a “public nuisance” by distributing “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” material. The law was designed to silence one man in particular, Jay M. Near, and his sleazy scandal rag, The Saturday Press. Described as “anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-black, and anti-labor,” Near was a constant thorn in the side of Minneapolis politicians. His vulgar brand of yellow journalism accused them of incompetence, graft, conspiracy, and just about every other crime, rarely backed by a scintilla of evidence. The politicians repaid the favor and attempted to use the public nuisance law to permanently stop the publication of his paper. Near claimed the law infringed his First Amendment press rights as an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.18 Near was not styled a corporate rights case.

., 77 working class, 198, 213–14, 385 working hours, 164, 180–81, 185, 320 workplace safety laws, 49, 99, 164 World War I, 232, 238, 239, 246 World War II, 281, 300, 331, 367 writs of attachment, 250 Yale, Elihu, 26, 382 Yale College, 4, 26 Yale Law Journal, 135 Yale Law School, 382–89, 384 Yale University, 318 yellow fever, 126–27 yellow journalism, 194–95, 241–42 yeoman farmers, 40 You Are There (TV show), 279 Zuccotti Park, 374–75 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ADAM WINKLER is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. His scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States on the constitutional rights of corporations and on the Second Amendment.


pages: 145 words: 41,453

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

However, as these luxuries were normalised and grew in abundance – with more channels on cable TV and more printed press, including weekly magazines – the increased competition saw news audiences shrink. The news industry responded by cutting costs and changing their products to compete with the entertainment preferences of the consumer. Stories became jacked up with crime, scandal, celebrities and ‘scientific breakthroughs’. This kind of reporting was termed ‘yellow journalism’ in the 1990s, characterised by its exaggerated, sensationalised and poorly researched content. One newspaper historian describes it as a ‘shrieking, gaudy, sensation-loving, devil-may-care kind of [reporting that] lured the reader by any possible means’.23 News used to be published less frequently when something truly important happened, something that was of national or international concern.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Thoughtful leadership can channel an outrage into responsible reform, captured in the politician’s saying “Never let a crisis go to waste.”31 But the history of public outrages suggests they can also empower demagogues and egg impassioned mobs into quagmires and disasters. Overall, I suspect that more good comes from cooler heads assessing harms accurately and responding to them proportionately.32 * * * • • • Outrages cannot become public without media coverage. It was in the aftermath of the Maine explosion that the term “yellow journalism” came into common usage. Even when journalists don’t whip readers into a jingoistic lather, intemperate public reactions are a built-in hazard. I believe journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding. Cynics might respond that the journalists couldn’t care less, since the only thing that matters to them is clicks and eyeballs.

See mythology mindset; reality mindset See also cognitive illusions; informal fallacies; Index of Biases and Fallacies irrelevant alternatives, sensitivity to, 177–78, 188–92, 350n8 James, William, 37 Jefferson, Thomas, 336, 339 Jenkins, Simon, 303 Jewish humor, 83, 89, 141–42, 192, 246, 262, 265, 325 See also Morgenbesser, Sidney Jewish people conspiracy theories about, 287 the Golden Rule in religion, 68 the Holocaust, 67, 184, 286 as percentage of population, 120 JFK (film), 303 Jindal, Bobby, 357n73 Johnson, Samuel, 111 Johnson, Vinnie “The Microwave,” 131 journalism cognitive biases and, 125 data and context, provision of, 127 editing and fact-checking in, 41, 300–301, 314, 316 innumeracy of, 125–27, 314 recommendations for, 127, 314, 316, 317 and the replicability crisis, 161–62 “yellow journalism,” 125 See also media; pundits judicial system overview of classic illusions of, 321 accountability for lying and, 313 adversarial system of, 41, 316 correlation implying causation and, 260 death penalty, 221, 294, 311, 333 eyewitness testimony, 216, 219 fairness and, 217 false convictions, 216–21 forensic methods in, 216, 219–20 guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, 217 inadmissible evidence, 57–58 juries, 57–58, 63, 202, 217–21 lie detectors in, 219 preponderance of the evidence, 217, 218 presumption of innocence, 217 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 238–42, 244 probability illusions and, 117–18, 129–30, 131, 138–39 prosecutor’s fallacy, 140–41 signal detection and, 202, 216–21, 352n17 See also crime; homicide Jung, Carl, 144 Kahan, Dan, 293, 295, 297–98 Kahneman, Daniel, 7, 9–10, 11, 25–29, 29, 119, 146, 154–55, 156, 190–95, 254, 342n15, 349–50nn6,27 Kaine, Tim, 82 Kant, Immanuel, 69, 327 Kaplan, Robert, 25 Kardashians, 99, 102 Kennedy, John F., 144, 259, 286, 303 Kennedy, John F., Jr., 33 Keynes, John Maynard, 310 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 65 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 328, 339 Kissinger, Henry, 107 knowledge Bayesian reasoning and priors, 157–58 defined as justified true belief, 36, 344n1 logic and requirement to ignore, 95–98 rumors conveying, 308 and trust in institutions, 313–14 used in service of goals, 36–37 Kpelle people, 96–97 Langer, Ellen, 342n17 language ambiguity of conditionals, 140–41 conversational habits, 10, 21, 28, 30, 78–80, 87–88, 308, 343n43 defenses against lying and, 313 as recursive, 71 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 113–14 Lardner, Ring, 43 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 173 Law and Order (TV show), 238–39 Lebowitz, Fran, 325 left and right (political) Bayesian reasoning and, 297 expressive rationality, 297–98 intellectual roots of, 296 mask-wearing during pandemic and, 296 moral and ideological alignments, 296 moral superiority and, 296 motivated numeracy and, 292–94 openness to evidence and, 311 political bias as asymmetrical, 312–13, 357n73 political bias as bipartisan, 295–96, 297, 312 as religious sects, 296 rise of, factors in, 296–97 and science, sympathy vs. hostility, 284, 295, 297, 312 as tribes, 296 views of protests, 294–95 See also Democratic Party and Democrats; myside bias; politics; Republican Party and Republicans Lehrer, Jonah, 353n13 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 74, 93–94, 98, 101 Let’s Make a Deal.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Working through D’Souza he charged Charles Harder, an entertainment lawyer, with undertaking an opposition research operation more extensive than the one he’d attempted years earlier at Clarium. Harder and his team scoured Gawker’s ugliest posts, looking for potential plaintiffs, and dug up memos and public statements by founder Nick Denton that could be used against him in court. In a memo to staff, Denton had written that “the staples of the old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex; crime; and even better, sex crime.” Eventually, investigators working for the Thiel-funded effort would interview former employees, find out that Gawker had been using unpaid interns, and arrange for those former unpaid interns to sue the company. Harder would bring several cases against Gawker, including one from a man who claimed to have invented email and who had been mocked by the website, another from an independent journalist whom Gawker had suggested might be suffering from “a paranoid freakout.”


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Jonathan Albright, a communications professor who analyzed a network of 300 news sites that were promulgating fake news during the 2016 election, made the same point about programmatic microtargeting. “This is a propaganda machine,” he wrote. “They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.” “Capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash” is nothing new. It was at the heart of much media in the days of “yellow journalism” at the turn of the twentieth century, beaten back by journalistic standards for much of the century, then reasserted in its closing decades by talk radio and by Fox News on TV. Social media and its advertising business model has taken the process to its logical conclusion. Targeted social media campaigns will almost certainly be a feature of all future political campaigns.

(Harvard Business Review), 204 Wikipedia, 43 Williams, Alan, 141–43 Williams, Evan “Ev,” 226–27 Woetzel, Jonathan, xxiii Wolff, Steve, 79–81 World Wars I and II, results compared, xxv World Wide Web, xii–xiii, 14, 26 Apache server, 99 as collective intelligence of users, 32–35 data collection implications, 40 evolution of webmaster position, 348 as global brain developing a body, 45–47, 158, 235 HTML as a learning by doing software, 339 and Microsoft, 100 services vs. applications, 30–31 Web 2.0, 28–31, 40 See also Internet Yahoo!, 89, 285 Yahoo! Finance, 126 Y Combinator, 98, 306 Yegge, Steve, 111–13 yellow journalism, 208 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 205 Young, Bob, 24 YouTube, 102, 288–89, 316, 342 Zarsky, Tal, 181 Zeckhauser, Richard, 182 Zimmer, John, 77 Zimride, 77 Zipcar, 84–85 Zipline’s on-demand blood-delivery drones, 370 Zuckerberg, Mark, 187, 199, 201–2, 206, 218, 219–20, 302–3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR TIM O’REILLY is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

A battle is fought three thousand miles away, and we have the particulars while they are taking the wounded to the hospital.” This intimacy could be manipulated, however. A new generation of newspaper tycoons arose, who turned sensationalism into an art form, led by Harvard dropout turned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. His “yellow journalism” (named for the tint of the comics in two competing New York dailies, Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World) was the kind of wild rumormongering American readers couldn’t get enough of—and that helped spark the Spanish-American War of 1898. When one of his photographers begged to return home from Spanish-controlled Cuba because nothing was happening, Hearst cabled back: “Please remain.

See leaders memes, 186–93 open access to, 193–202 radio use in, 32 real-time reporting of, 62–64 robo-reality wars, 248–57 Russia and, 111 social media and, 15–16 treason in, 266 types of, 184 weaponization of information, 181–86 Wars of German Unification, 30 Warzel, Charlie, 175 Washington, George, 158 Web 2.0, 45 web brigades, 110–11 webcams, 41, 254 weblogs, 44 WeChat, 50–51, 100, 101 Weibo, 130, 162 Welch, Edgar, 127–37 WhatsApp, 5, 50, 247 Wheeler, John Archibald, 26 white supremacists, 115, 170, 188–89, 232, 237–39 Wikipedia, 45, 78, 98 Williams, Evan, 19 Winfrey, Oprah, 119 Winnie-the-Pooh, 98 Winter, Charlie, 152 women, harassment of, 229, 238 Woolley, Samuel, 145 World War I, 181–82 World War II the Blitz, 18 computer use, 25 German invasion of France, 7–8 intelligence gathering, 78 Marshall Plan, 157–58 World Wide Web, 38–39, 95 See also internet Wyden, Ron, 224 X Xi Jinping, 97, 98, 99, 101 Xue, Charles, 99 Y Yanukovych, Viktor, 203 yellow journalism, 31 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 238 Yoda, 163 YouTube Al Qaeda, 234 anti-hate organizations, 172 censorship, 92, 231 content creation, 58, 247 copyright algorithm, 226 flat-earthers, 123 flight MH17, 72 Google and, 49 Google Brain project, 249 “Macaca” moment, 55–57 military training and recruitment, 9 origin of, 218–19 #Pizzagate incident, 128 regulation, 230, 250 Russia Today (RT), 107–8 terrorism and, 151–52 training videos, 9, 198, 234 Tunisian slaughter, 85 war in real time, 193 Yuan Zhifa, 96 Z Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), 40–41 Zappa, Frank, 72 Zeitzoff, Thomas, 195–96 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 105 Zimmerman, Amy, 166 Zuckerberg, Mark Arab Spring, 85 fake news profits, 119 information gathering, 57 origin of Facebook, 42–47, 260 political leadership, 223, 242, 268 scale and power of, 221 U.S. presidential election (2016), 240, 241, 243 10,590 Meters Below Sea Level, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean Sometimes history is made in the dark.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

But partisanship was just a toddler phase for the press. Before newspapers could enter into respectability, they needed to go through an adolescence of sensationalism. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a new generation of press barons (William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer) came to see the massive profits to be made in yellow journalism—overhyped, tawdry stories about crime and gossip, with lavish illustrations and blunt headlines. The sensationalist press generated sizable audiences—a large mass of consumers who could be persuaded to buy the new products rolling out of the factories and sold in urban department stores. “The pull of dollars towards sensationalism helped move newspapers away from the political parties,” the media historian Michael Schudson writes.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Although Tesla had not yet worked out the business details, reporters noted that he “was most enthusiastic in his veiled references to the financial assistance he has received.”38 Never a fan of the New York tabloids, Morgan was unimpressed with Tesla’s newspaper coverage and perhaps even annoyed.39 As the Literary Digest noted, “The daily papers treat [Tesla’s] various pronunciamentos each after its kind, the yellow journals with weird pictures and big headlines, the more serious ones with skeptical paragraphs.”40 However, as the negotiations with Andrew Carnegie and the other steel barons came to a close, Morgan assigned one of his partners, Charles Steele, to work with Tesla. Steele asked Tesla to draft a letter of agreement in which Morgan would advance funds to Tesla in return for a 51% share of Tesla’s wireless patents.

Another view is that he allowed himself to be unduly influenced by his friends in the press such as T. C. Martin and Johnson.27 But we can also ask a counterfactual question: if Tesla had kept his illusions modest, would anyone have paid any attention to his inventions in the mid-1890s? To some extent, Tesla was responding to his era’s “yellow journalism.” As the large New York tabloids vied for circulation in the 1890s, they sought out stories with oversized claims, and with each successive retelling the claims had to be further exaggerated.28 The scale of Tesla’s illusions is thus both a product of his personality as well as the way that popular culture was then taking shape.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The fact that the average household, including the lowest stratum, purchased 3.1 different newspapers is one of the most surprising in this chapter.6 The fastest growth occurred in 1870–1900, by which time newspapers had become firmly established as the main source of information and entertainment for a growing population.7 Color presses were introduced in the 1890s and were first used to produce color comics and supplements.8 By the early twentieth century, newspapers had extended their content far beyond the news itself and added “gossip columns, travel and leisure advice, color comics, and sporting results.”9 The interval from 1880 to 1905 was the age of “yellow journalism,” likely named after the “Yellow Kid” comic strip character popular at the time. Metropolitan newspapers were locked in circulation wars in which success depended on publishing ever more sensational and sometimes sordid stories featuring “violence, sex, catastrophe, and mayhem.” The most famous circulation battle was in the late 1890s, between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

., and Paterson, Donald G. (2013). “Children of Eve: Population and Well-being in History,” Population and Development Review 39, no. 3. Calder, Lendol. (1999). Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Campbell, W. Joseph. (2001). Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cannon, Brian Q. (2000). “Power Relations: Western Rural Electric Cooperatives and the New Deal,” The Western Historical Quarterly 31, no. 2 (summer): 133–60. Carbone, June, and Cahn, Naomi. (2014). Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family.

See labor force working class: American, versus European (1870), 29; housing for, 102–4, 111; life of (1870), 56–57; Riis on, 97 working hours, 10, 258–61, 325; in 1940, 520; decline in, 13–14, 326–27; eight-hour day, 543 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 315 World War II: aircraft production during, 397; contribution to Great Leap of, 537; economy during, 548–53; food rationing during, 335; Great Leap Forward and, 563–64; movies during, 414–15; productivity increase during, 18, 540, 546–47; radio news broadcasts of, 197, 413–14; women in labor force during, 504 World Wide Web, 454, 459; See also Internet Wozniak, Steve, 452 Wright Brothers, 568 Xerox Company, 442, 451 X-rays, 226 yellow journalism, 177 Young, David M., 144 youth: in 1870, 58–59; in labor force, 248, 251–52; social media used by, 457; after World War II, 499–500 YouTube, 456 zoning laws, 649 Zuckerberg, Mark, 457, 567 Zworykin, Vladimir, 412–14 THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD Joel Mokyr, Series Editor Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 by Philip T.


pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

The paper’s headquarters, the New York World Building, shown below, was the tallest office tower in the world when completed in 1890. It was torn down in 1955 to build a new ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. The World became one of the first papers to run color in 1896, and its Yellow Kid cartoon lent its name to the term “yellow journalism,” which means sensationalism. The paper earned that sobriquet amid a series of fierce circulation battles with its archrival, the New York Journal American, owned by William Randolph Hearst. Pulitzer was best known for running stories that encouraged the thriving new immigrant community to read his paper, and many had great social impact, particularly its campaign against unsafe tenements.

., 1895). 9 Richard L. Frey, According to Hoyle: The Rules of Games (Random House. 1970), 212. 10 Mark Howard, “Bucking the Tiger: The Traditional Game of Faro,” Barbary Coast Vigilance Committee. 2004, www.bcvc.net/faro/. 11 Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or, the Pursuit of Freedom (1998), 404. 12 W. Joseph Campbell, Yellow Journalism (2003), 25. 13 Smitten, Jesse Livermore, 114. 14 John F. Stover, Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (1999), 90. 15 Henry Clews, Fifty Years in Wall Street (New York: Irving Publishing Company, 1908), 398. 16 Ibid. 17 Roger H. Grant, Erie Lackawanna (1996), 80. 18 John F. Stover, Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (1999), 71.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

A long time ago, my father taught me that whenever you see a question on the cover of a news magazine, the answer is always “No,” because the editorial staff knows that questions with “Yes” answers would, like graphic cigarette warnings and close-ups of pus-oozing genitalia that tend not to deter but encourage smoking and unsafe sex, scare the reader off. So you get yellow journalism like: O. J. Simpson and Race: Will the Verdict Split America? No. Has TV Gone Too Far? No. Is Anti-Semitism on the March Again? No, because it never halted. Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child? No, because a week after that issue hit the newsstands, five white kids, their backpacks filled with books, rape whistles, and mace, hopped off a rented school bus and attempted to reintegrate Chaff Middle School, where Assistant Principal Charisma Molina stood in the doorway, barring entrance to her quasi-segregated institution.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

., no 1:18-cr-00032-DLF (DC, US District Court, District of Columbia, 16 February 2018), www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download. People v Moody, No 4582-84, slip op at 3 (NY, Supreme Court, New York County, 27 June 1986). 7. USS Maine: The USS Maine blew up in Havana’s harbor in 1898, and an inflamed American public blamed Spain. Yellow journalism hyped the situation, and the United States marched to war against Spain crying, “Remember the Maine!” Actually, the Maine sank due to an internal explosion and was not the work of Madrid’s skullduggery. 8. Putin behind the Moscow bombings: John Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s rule, vol. 110 (Columbia University Press, 2014); Amy Knight, “Finally, We Know about the Moscow Bombings,” New York Review of Books 22 November 2012; see also US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Russia: Rebuilding the Iron Curtain, Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 110th Cong., 1st sess., 17 May 2007 (testimony by David Satter, senior fellow, Hudson Institute), https://web.archive.org/web/20110927065706/http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/SatterHouseTestimony2007.pdf. 9.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

It’s possible but unlikely that social media will have a qualitatively different impact than any previous form of media, but we generally find that when people start saying, “This time it’s different,” it usually isn’t. New technologies have always had the potential to lead to new problems. Newspapers led to demagogic “yellow journalism.” Advertising led to snake oil salesmen. The answer wasn’t to ban newspapers or advertising, but to build policies and institutions to mitigate the risks involved. That’s why we have libel laws and regulators like the FCC. And with time, audiences themselves become more sophisticated and develop their own “immune responses.”


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

The notion of a political objectivity in journalism would have seemed bizarre to the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson employed journalist James Callendar to muckrake on behalf of his favored causes and to undermine his enemies.26 For well over a century, newspapers openly identified with political parties. The era of yellow journalism was markedly free of concerns about objectivity. Only in the aftermath of World War I, with America’s intelligentsia falling out of love with democracy itself, did the press begin to conceive of itself as “objective”—as guardian of a unique fact-finding process that could provide audiences with information beyond the realm of political debate.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

One recent study of migration and street economies in southern Europe concluded that there was a “connection between working in the underground economy and deviant behavior,” though it provided no hard evidence that this link actually exists. In a similar fashion, a December 27, 2010, wire service dispatch in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet began with a classic yellow-journalism lead—“Unregistered economic activity is causing serious problems across the world”—but the rest of the article simply compared the estimated size of the informal economy in Turkey with that in other countries and offered absolutely no evidence of any problems this had actually created. Still, simply asserting that there’s a huge problem makes readers think it’s true.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

Having turned the Examiner around, Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal and initiated a vicious b increasingly b with attle with Pulitzer that drove the circulation of individual newspapers above one million copies for the first time. The two tried to outdo each other in sensationalism, inventing stories and faking pictures in what came to be known as “yellow journalism.” Most famously, Hearst used his papers to stoke anti-Spanish sentiment in 1898, printing lurid accounts of Spanish persecution in Cuba and helping turn public opinion in favor of war with Spain. Hearst is supposed to have told one of his artists, who wished to return from Cuba because not much was happening, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

By the attention it gives their misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians large than life….”8 I would go a step further—the press not only starts and prolongs quarrels, but thrives today on the exploitation of issues and agendas that serve the purposes of the various Marxist movements, and in doing so inflames and divides the entire nation along ideological lines. “In reviewing the persistent tendency of the newspapers to corrupt, I shall cite a passage from [author] James Fenimore Cooper,” writes Weaver. “Though Cooper lived before the advent of yellow journalism, he seems to have stated the essential situation with a truth and eloquence impossible to improve on when he said in The American Democrat: ‘As the press of this country now exists, it would seem to be expressly devised by the great agent of mischief, to depress and destroy all that is good, and to elevate and advance all that is evil in the nation.


pages: 307 words: 96,974

Rats by Robert Sullivan

gentrification, Louis Pasteur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, trade route, urban renewal, yellow journalism

He proposed life imprisonment for anyone claiming there was plague in San Francisco. He suggested that Joseph Kinyoun had planted plague bacilli on the Chinese man who died. Soon, all sides could agree on one thing: Dr. Kinyoun was a problem. The attacks against Kinyoun were notably malicious and slanderous even in a town with a long history of yellow journalism. Kinyoun held fast; his arrogance made him immune to some extent. He turned down bribes. He went on trial in the city for contempt and was eventually found innocent. He was constantly being lampooned in cartoons such as the one that showed him being injected in the head with plague serum. His work was described by the press as "stupid and malignant."


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

And “the most important” part of the story, “regardless of any legal impact it had,” was that after this battle, kids from around the world were fighting back. They were “fighting their own battles now, because they have the confidence to do what they can.” This was the part of the story that I had heard about. It was the part, in my perverse yellow-journalism sense, I wanted Lawver to tell me more about. But to my surprise, and (eventual) delight, Lawver was not so interested in trashing Warner. Her real interest was in making me understand a different, less-reported part of the story. For this was not simply a story of the big bad media company.


The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

The accumulation of elaborate statistical records arose from management's attempt to reduce winning to a routine, to measure efficient performance. The athletic contest itself surrounded by a vast apparatus of information and promotion, now appeared almost incidental to the expensive preparation required ' , " " , , to stage it. The rise of a new kind of journalism-the yellow journalism pioneered by Hearst and Pulitzer, which sold sensations instead The Degradation of Sport : 121 of reporting news-helped to professionalize amateur athletics, to assimilate sport to promotion, and to make professional athletics into a major industry. Until the twenties, professional sports, where they existed at all, attracted little of the public attention lavished on college football.


pages: 414 words: 108,413

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

Privatization would prove to be a watershed in Icahn’s fragile alliance with organized labor. The Ozark acquisition, the revamping of the route structure and the initial turnaround in reported earning led the unions to believe that they had made the right choice between Icahn and Lorenzo. Perhaps all the Wall Street backroom wheeler-dealer talk was nothing more than yellow journalism. Perhaps Icahn was, as he portrayed himself, a 1980s Renaissance man: part financial genius, part business builder, always a man of his word. The optimism that prevailed during the honeymoon period, though, turned quickly to anger and pessimism as the details of the privatization leaked to the unions.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Today the membership of the Organization of News Ombudsmen and Standards Editors (founded in 1980 and known as ONO) comprises news ombudspeople, readers’ representatives and standards editors from around the world, working online, in print, and in television and radio. It has more than fifty members in North and South America, Europe, and parts of the Middle East and Asia. The idea of the ombudsperson really took off in America, where the principles of objectivity (SEE: IMPARTIALITY) and news you can trust were established in the battles over yellow journalism in the 1920s. In the decades that followed, the American Society of News Editors inculcated American journalists with the principles of ‘sincerity, truthfulness, accuracy and impartiality’ and so it was a natural cultural progression to the idea of ombudspeople. In the UK, meanwhile, media self-regulation was wrenched, kicking and screaming, from a press desperate to fight off government press legislation.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Reality-based journalists can be proud of doing their jobs with determination and professionalism during the Trump administration despite relentless vilification by the president and his many allies. At the same time, though, their commitment to reporting as objectively as they can—a hard-won norm which emerged from more than a century of partisanship and yellow journalism—has come under challenge as never before. Mainstream media outlets find themselves under growing pressure from activists and interest groups within their own ranks to bend coverage toward social justice (as defined by the political left, usually) and to deplatform, or at least disfavor, contrary views.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

And when the senator ordered the post office to intercept and return all letters and packages from the duke to his daughter, including one reportedly containing an engagement ring, the press and public made the elder Elkins the villain. Some later accounts had it costing the ambitious senator the presidency.3 New York’s Evening Post denounced the prying coverage as yellow journalism at its worst, and the Times of London agreed, but both reprinted the core of it, sent reporters scurrying after the latest scoop, and clearly sided with the star-crossed lovers, if for no other reason than that the union would sell papers.4 “The mystery surrounding the Duke of the Abruzzi and Miss Elkins, so far as the marriage which an inquisitive Press is anxious to arrange between them is concerned, remains as deep as ever,” the Times noted in late 1908.5 “The Duke of the Abruzzi might, were he so minded, find a wife in almost any royal household in Europe,” the New York Times added.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Large cities often had over a dozen competing daily newspapers; papers came and went, and nearly every newspaper was owned by a single publisher who also was the editor or had a strong say in the editorial direction.63 But capitalism imposed its logic. In some cases profit-hungry publishers found that sensationalism, what came to be called yellow journalism, was a lucrative course. Bribery of journalists, showing favoritism toward advertisers, and many other unethical practices were common. Most important, by the 1890s newspaper markets began to shift from competitive to oligopolistic, even monopolistic. Although revenues and population continued to increase sharply, the overall number of newspapers began to stagnate and then fall.


pages: 476 words: 129,209

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon

British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, discovery of penicillin, housing crisis, index card, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

Add to this the persistent rumors that Captain Le Médec’s last-second decision to cut across Imo’s bow was actually intentional, designed to create the collision, fire, and explosion that followed, and the men of Mont-Blanc clearly had their work cut out for them when it came to public opinion. An editorial in the Truro Daily News expressed a common opinion when it said those responsible for “ ‘such a needless collision’ in clear weather ‘should be hung in good old-fashioned style’ from the yardarm.” Yellow journalism was still in vogue, and was practiced widely. But even if it hadn’t been, people recovering from the greatest man-made disaster in North American history should expect some answers. If the investigation proved some were guilty of criminal negligence or worse, the death penalty would not seem unreasonable at a time when sons overseas were being executed for desertion.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

The most worrisome mind-altering substance at the turn of the century was not cocaine or opium, but alcohol. Alcoholic drinks had been popular in the United States since the founding of the Republic, but from the eighteenth century onwards, drinkers had to contend with a strong temperance movement. American newspapers were chock-a-block with the yellow journalism of zealous moral entrepreneurs, who regularly claimed that booze lay at the root of most of the crime, insanity, poverty, divorce, illegitimacy and business failures in the United States. So when cocaine use was banned, it was as a small part of a much broader movement against all kinds of intoxication.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Jam stood and embraced him, then made the introductions. “I am his servant,” Rehman said. “No, I am his servant,” Jam replied. Then he ushered Rehman out. Our conversation was cordial, occasionally intense. Jam criticized Kamran repeatedly, calling him an agent of intelligence services. Kamran’s reporting was never correct; it was “yellow journalism” against Jam’s government. Yet he said that he liked Kamran personally and did not want any harm to come to him. I suggested that there were legal means available to control the press if Jam felt it was irresponsible, and he said, yes, there were, but he went on to talk animatedly about how ineffective the legal means were because the government could never win lawsuits and reporters never felt the pinch of having to pay legal bills.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

“EXTREMISM,” OR THE ART OF SMEARING by Ayn Rand Among the many symptoms of today’s moral bankruptcy, the performance of the so-called “moderates” at the Republican National Convention was the climax, at least to date. It was an attempt to institutionalize smears as an instrument of national policy—to raise those smears from the private gutters of yellow journalism to the public summit of a proposed inclusion in a political party platform. The “moderates” were demanding a repudiation of “extremism” without any definition of that term. Ignoring repeated challenges to define what they meant by “extremism,” substituting vituperation for identification, they kept the debate on the level of concretes and would not name the wider abstractions or principles involved.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

To his admirers, Goswami was a muckraker in the noble tradition of the campaigning magazines of late nineteenth-century America, which picked fights with corporate monopolies and corrupt politicians. Yet his influence was just as often lamented by those who saw in him echoes of the fearmongering “yellow journalism” of US publisher William Randolph Hearst. In 2012, liberal academic Madhu Kishwar laid out this broader critique in an open letter, comparing Goswami’s show to a kangaroo court in which its host ignored “the necessary dividing line between journalist and crusader.”6 In Goswami’s style, critics saw an Indian variant of what became known later as “post-truth” politics, in which the nightly clash of guests deepened social divisions but added little to public understanding.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

In its 1910 published version, it begins “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.” He had joined the Anti-Imperialist League founded in 1898 to oppose the United States’ war against Spain and its annexation of Spain’s former colony of the Philippines. The public appetite for war had been whipped up by the newspapers during the era of sensationalistic “yellow journalism,” though James tended to believe that there was an inherent appetite for war. Many prominent intellectuals and public figures, including writer Mark Twain (who was vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 to 1910), were ferociously opposed to the explicit amorality of that war and feared the transformation of their country into an imperial power.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Banerjee, Abhijit. 1992. “A Simple Model of Herd Behavior.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(3):797–817. Banerjee, Abhijit, and Drew Fudenberg. 2004. “Word-of-Mouth Learning.” Games and Economic Behavior 46(1):1–22. Banks, Elizabeth L. 1898. “American Yellow Journalism.” Nineteenth Century, August, 328–40. Bardhan, Nilanjana. 2001. “Transnational AIDS-HIV News Narratives: A Critical Exploration of Overarching Frames.” Mass Communication and Society 4(3):283–309. Barthes, Roland. 2013 [1984]. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Bartholomew, D. J. 1982.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

“Surgeon Explains Valentino’s Death,” New York Times, September 4, 1926, 3. 16. “Valentino Better; Passes the Crisis,” New York Times, August 20, 1926, 2. 17. “Valentino Sinking; Second Crisis Near; Pleurisy Spreads,” New York Times, August 23, 1926, 1. 18. Ibid. 19. Editorial, “Death of Valentino and Yellow Journalism,” The Nation, September 8, 1926, 207. 20. “Thousands in Riot at Valentino Bier,” New York Times, August 25, 1926, 1. 21. H. Lilienthal, “Resection of the Lung for Suppurative Infections with a Report Based on 31 Operative Cases in Which Resection Was Done or Intended,” Annals of Surgery 65 (1922): 257. 22.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Hello from the cracks in the sidewalk of N.Y.C. and from these ants that dwell in these cracks… It was signed, “Son of Sam.” Breslin offered his services should the killer wish to turn himself in to authorities. (The story shared the front page with an image of burning cars captioned, “Two Dead in Chicago Riot.”) The rival New York Post, recently purchased by the Australian yellow-journalism magnate Rupert Murdoch, ramped up the sensationalism to keep pace. You could read the terror at a distance, just walking down the street; an inordinate number of women cut their hair in Dorothy Hamill bobs. Son of Sam’s victims all had long hair. A week later, another alleged serial killer was on the loose—an interstate offender.

The remaining quotes are divided between the newscasts at VTVNA and this article. “Throughout the day” NBC News, December 3, 1979, VTVNA. “engraved invitation” “The Shah, Seven Presidents Later,” WP, December 21, 1979. “TEDDY IS THE TOAST” New York Post, December 9, 1979; MFTVE, 26:37; Patrick Brogan, “Citizen Murdoch: Can Yellow Journalism Cover the World,” New Republic, October 10, 1982. solemn event UPI, December 5, 1979; “1980 Democratic Presidential Nomination: Remarks Announcing Candidacy,” December 4, 1979, APP. pollsters at NBC AP, December 1, 1979. much smaller survey ABC News, December 7, 1979, VTVNA. “I’m sorry” Joe Klein, “Camelot Collapsing,” NYT Magazine, December 24, 1979.

New York Stock Exchange Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009), 236. “U.S. Geological Survey” Green, Reagan’s Reign of Error, 106. credit controls Stacey L. Schreft, “Credit Controls: 1980,” Economic Review, November/December 1990. Rupert Murdoch Jimmy Carter, White House Diary, 402; Patrick Brogan, “Citizen Murdoch: Can Yellow Journalism Cover the World,” New Republic, October 10, 1982. United Nations ambassador Witcover and Germond, Blue Smoke Mirrors, 152. “Friends, Herbert Hoi-ver” Carroll O’Connor for Kennedy ad, YouTube.com, accessed April 20, 2020; Elliot Curson interview, Fresh Air, WHYY, 1980. New York City subway system White, America In Search of Itself, 299.


pages: 1,108 words: 321,463

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

British Empire, collective bargaining, Easter island, laissez-faire capitalism, plutocrats, profit motive, the scientific method, yellow journalism

If you had just met Father, and he were working for the Wynand papers, that would be exactly the right thing to say. But not with me. That’s what I’d expect you to say and I don’t like to hear what I expect. It would be much more interesting if you said that the Wynand papers are a contemptible dump heap of yellow journalism and all their writers put together aren’t worth two bits.” “Is that what you really think of them?” “Not at all. But I don’t like people who try to say only what they think I think.” “Thanks. I’ll need your help. I’ve never met anyone ... oh, no, of course, that’s what you didn’t want me to say.

She turned and went on to her bedroom, and heard him closing the guest-room door. “Is it not appropriate,” wrote Lancelot Clokey in a syndicated article, “that Howard Roark is being defended by the Wynand papers? If anyone doubts the moral issues involved in this appalling case, here is the proof of what’s what and who stands where. The Wynand papers—that stronghold of yellow journalism, vulgarity, corruption and muckraking, that organized insult to public taste and decency, that intellectual underworld ruled by a man who has less conception of principles than a cannibal—the Wynand papers are the proper champions of Howard Roark, and Howard Roark is their rightful hero. After a lifetime devoted to blasting the integrity of the press, it is only fit that Gail Wynand should now support a cruder fellow dynamiter.”


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Here is a small set of examples: they’re all fruitcakes; you’re nuts; it’s Greek to me; while wearing her parental hat; he punted on the term paper; what a mousy person; watertight reasoning; today was another rollercoaster for the stock market; he snowed the committee; my engine is coughing; an old salt; a spineless senator; the company folded; a bubbly personality; they creamed the other team; let the wine breathe; to dress the salad; a rule of thumb; I was such a chicken; a cool idea; nerves of steel; pass the acid test; in round figures; she’s so square; you’re getting warmer; yellow journalism; what a drag; he just didn’t dig; cloverleaf exchange; hairpin turn; make a hit; no soap; she’s really wired today; he swallowed her story; the old man finally croaked; she drove me crazy; carpet bombing; an umbrella clause; a blanket excuse; we just nosed them out; a straw vote; a blue mood; we always horse around; his gravelly voice; they railroaded us… and on and on.

Below are listed some concepts — just a minuscule subset of the concepts that our culture abounds in — the possession of which would seem to give us a substantial leg up on people from previous generations or centuries: Positive and negative feedback, vicious circle, self-fulfilling prophecy, famous for being famous, backlash, supply and demand, market forces, the subconscious, subliminal imagery, Freudian slip, (Edipus complex, defense mechanism, sour grapes, passive-aggressive behavior, peer pressure, racial profiling, ethnic stereotype, status symbol, zero-sum game, catch-22, gestalt, chemical bond, catalyst, photosynthesis, DNA, virus, genetic code, dominant and recessive genes, immune system, auto-immune disease, natural selection, food chain, endangered species, ecological niche, exponential growth, population explosion, contraception, noise pollution, toxic waste, crop rotation, cross-fertilization, cloning, chain reaction, chain store, chain letter, email, spam, phishing, six degrees of separation, Internet, Web-surfing, uploading and downloading, video game, viral video, virtual reality, chat room, cybersecurity, data mining, artificial intelligence, IQ, robotics, morphing, time reversal, slow motion, time-lapse photography, instant replay, zooming in and out, galaxy, black hole, atom, superconductivity, radioactivity, nuclear fission, antimatter, sound wave, wavelength, X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic-resonance imagery, laser, laser surgery, heart transplant, defibrillator, space station, weightlessness, bungee jumping, home run, switch hitter, slam-dunk, Hail Mary pass, sudden-death playoff, make an end run around someone, ultramarathon, pole dancing, speed dating, multitasking, brainstorming, namedropping, channel-surfing, soap opera, chick flick, remake, rerun, subtitles, sound bite, buzzword, musical chairs, telephone tag, the game of Telephone, upping the ante, playing chicken, bumper cars, SUVs, automatic transmission, oil change, radar trap, whiplash, backseat driver, oil spill, superglue, megachurch, placebo, politically correct language, slippery slope, pushing the envelope, stock-market crash, recycling, biodegradability, assembly line, black box, wind-chill factor, frequent-flyer miles, hub airport, fast food, soft drink, food court, VIP lounge, moving sidewalk, shuttle bus, cell-phone lot, genocide, propaganda, paparazzi, culture shock, hunger strike, generation gap, quality time, Murphy’s law, roller coaster, in-joke, outsource, downsize, upgrade, bell-shaped curve, fractal shape, breast implant, Barbie doll, trophy wife, surrogate mother, first lady, worst-case scenario, prenuptial agreement, gentrification, paradigm shift, affirmative action, gridlock, veganism, karaoke, power lunch, brown-bag lunch, blue-chip company, yellow journalism, purple prose, greenhouse effect, orange alert, red tape, white noise, gray matter, black list… Not only does our culture provide us with such potent concepts, it also encourages us to analogically extend them both playfully and seriously, which gives rise to a snowballing of the number of concepts.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

“Since the beginning of journalism, there has been bias in the media. From the first journalist carving on stone tablets, media bias and bias of human beings has been a fact of life. But today we face an altogether different threat. The power of big tech is something that William Randolph Hearst at the height of yellow journalism could not have imagined. “Polling shows roughly 70 percent of Americans receive their political news from social media,” he said. “Over and over again I’ve heard from Americans concerned about a consistent pattern of political bias and censorship on the part of big tech.” After several flowery minutes Cruz got around to admitting that he had zero evidence conservatives were being systematically censored.


pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

The scandals that periodically erupted in the press about Hubbard’s biography, or his disappearance, or the church’s use of private investigators and the courts to harass critics—these things rarely touched the awareness of Scientology luminaries. Many simply didn’t want to hear about the problems inside their organization. It was easy enough to chalk such revelations up to religious persecution or yellow journalism. “There are two sides to the story, but I don’t know both sides,” Travolta blithely said when he was asked about Operation Snow White. “I’m not involved with that.” In any case, for someone like Travolta, who was so publicly associated with the church, it would be hard to just walk away. He had been asked to declare himself publicly, and he had done so, again and again.


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

"A splendid fight," enthused the publisher, after a visit to the battlefield, with a revolver in his belt and a pencil and notebook in his hand. "A splendid little war," agreed future secretary of state John Hay, in a letter to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. More than six decades later, the American press had shed much of its jingoistic, "yellow journalism" character. But there were still publishers and reporters in the Hearst tradition who enthusiastically campaigned for a showdown, this time with the Soviet Union. The role once played by Hearst was assumed by the Time-Life empire of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, which accused the Kennedy administration of "doing nothing" to prevent a Communist takeover of Cuba.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

In fact, even for the later period of increasing polarization after 1970, evidence in support of many putative causal factors is weak. This is true of the role of individual politicians, or of electoral or legislative institutions, like gerrymandering or campaign finance.102 Change in the mass media (from “yellow journalism” in 1900 to Uncle Walter Cronkite in mid-century to Fox News and Twitter feeds today) is a plausible suspect in this mystery, but research has found no clear answer to which is cause and which effect.103 We shall return to the task of understanding the full 125-year cycle of falling and rising polarization later in this book.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

But though two witnesses supposedly came forward, none actually appeared before the grand jury, which again exonerated the girl. “Nothing is sacred to Mr. Hearst,” the pro-Bell Beverly Hills Citizen editorialized, “not even a man’s fireside.” Even Chandler’s Times agreed with the Bell forces this one time, calling the attacks on Minnewa “vicious yellow journalism” and “reprehensible tactics,” though warning darkly that approval of the cement plant “would be a severe blow to our good name abroad as well as a serious inroad upon our security at home.” Early in 1930, the city council gave Bell another ray of hope, approving the quarry; a few days later the mayor of Los Angeles ratified the decision.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

A popular poem in Havana described him as having “the look of a reptile, the body of a dwarf, the instinct of a jackal, a soul like mud.” In the United States, newspapers dwelled on the suffering of the reconcentrados, publishing pictures of emaciated children and the mass graves of Cubans who had succumbed. The coverage was almost obsessive and helped launch what came to be called “yellow journalism”—a new wave of sensationalized news with bold, alarmist headlines.18 Whatever the world’s opinions of Weyler, the Spanish government placed in him all its hopes of retaining Cuba. Madrid sent him reinforcements and set aside questions about the morality or efficacy of his policies. Weyler escalated engagements with the enemy and ordered the killing of wounded, captured, or surrendered combatants.


pages: 898 words: 253,177

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, California gold rush, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Garrett Hardin, Golden Gate Park, hacker house, jitney, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

After the First World War, aluminum became cheaper, though still not common. The raw material, the production flow, the manufacturing patent, and the end uses were pretty much controlled by the Aluminum Company of America, which was to vertical integration what William Randolph Hearst was to yellow journalism. Hearst, at least, had competition; Alcoa didn’t—except from Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world leader in aluminum production soon after seizing power, for reasons the Allies did not immediately discern. When the first electricity began to flow out of Bonneville Dam, the Corps of Engineers’ big power and navigation dam three hundred miles downriver, the government tried to induce Alcoa’s potential competitors to build plants in the Northwest by offering them bargain rates, but nobody was particularly interested.


The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, interchangeable parts, plutocrats, rent control, rent stabilization, Socratic dialogue, traveling salesman, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

“The Yanks! Dear God, I love them! Tells them a joke. Dear God, dear God…I do like a fellow with sand. Make a note of this, Brian. Give him a rise in pay. Twenty-five dollars a week. But for God’s sake, don’t tell him or anyone else what for. Tells them a joke! Raped by a gorilla!” Steiner’s love of yellow journalism, his awe of the “sand” that gave journalists the courage to try such stunts, was so genuine, Fallow and Highridge couldn’t help but laugh along with him. Steiner’s little face was far from that of a Dead Mouse at this moment. The outrageous zest of this American photographer, Silverstein, lent him life, even radiance.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The village lies nestled along the west­ ern side of the river valley, which rises steeply to a sort of hilly plateau. The gridded blocks are bisected by service alleys lined by barns and car­ riage houses. The nineteenth-century houses were cobbled over with 1960s redos, and the materials they used-aluminum and asbestos sid­ ing, fake brick-have entered a secondary stage of decay. Many blue and yellow New York State historical markers stand scat­ tered around the town today. Each tells a little piece of the story of the Battle of Saratoga, which took place in woods and farm fields nearby in 1777. "Here the British Army parked their artillery," says one marker near the driveway of the High School.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Finally, out on the little county thoroughfare named Phalanx Road, as we are heading toward the parkway, we spot it nearly engulfed in the trees and with no pull-out, no way to safely sidle up and squint and say, “Honey, what is a ‘phalanx’?” Lost in the grass is one of those little standard-issue blue-and-yellow New York State historical markers: North American Phalanx. Site of the 1844 cooperative agricultural community; founded by Albert Brisbane and modeled after the philosophy of French Socialist Charles Fourier. This communal experiment was a success until it was destroyed by a fire in 1854. Behind the sign the land dips toward a thin brook that feeds this tiny, scrubby strip of woods—itself somehow undisturbed by the particleboard planned community it buffers from the sound of the road.


pages: 863 words: 159,091

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

Some think freedom always comes with democracy; however, many voters in many countries have voted for governments that they know will restrict their rights. When items in a series have internal punctuation, separate them with semicolons (see also 21.2.2). Green indicates vegetation that remained stable; red, vegetation that disappeared; yellow, new vegetation. 21.4 Colon A colon introduces a clause, phrase, or series of elements that expands, clarifies, or exemplifies the meaning of what precedes it. Between independent clauses, it functions much like a semicolon, though more strongly emphasizing balance or consequence. People expect three things of government: peace, prosperity, and respect for civil rights.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

Paralleling this was the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, which catered to an expanding reading public. Competing in fierce circulation wars, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other press barons plied readers with scandals and crusades. Nonetheless, the turn of the century marked more than the heyday of strident tabloids and yellow journalism, as sophisticated publications began to tackle complex stories, illustrating them lavishly and promoting them aggressively. For the first time in history, college graduates went to work on newspapers and magazines, bringing a new literary flair to a world once considered beneath the dignity of the educated elite.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Shankaranand and his predecessor in the Ministry of Health supported an unusual medical paradigm: daily consumption of one’s own urine as treatment for cancer or AIDS.20 So from the first moments of Surat’s epidemic the Indian public was deluged with at least as much misinformation as actual facts. And while it was tempting to blame the media for its lack of accuracy and for yellow journalism, India’s health care establishment had to share credit. The information schism—between truth and fantasy, accuracy and exaggeration—would prove disastrous for India in coming days.21 But in Surat itself there were few citizens left who could be misinformed, and nearly the entire medical profession, save the dedicated nurses and physicians of Civil Hospital, had flown the coop.


The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

Dramatically, she unrolled a computerized list of rare causes of hyperglycemia that church members had found on the Internet. She argued that the doctors were malfeasÂ� ant for neglecting to test for these problems. How€– she turned to the judge – how could they take away her little girl whom she had raised from infancy? She unfolded the yellowed news article with her photo as she reminded the judge that the City of San Francisco had named her foster mother of the month just 10 years ago. She hinted at a suit for malpractice. Tanetia was called up. She said that she loved her Grams. She said that she knew that Grams needed the money. Tanetia almost whispered, “I don’t want to live elsewhere.”


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

The story was picked up by Time, Newsweek, Editor & Publisher, and the LA Times, among others.41 An informal survey of twenty-six boys’ homes showed that immediately after the exposé, more than a third of them said that their fund-raising efforts were affected.42 But Monsignor Francis Schmitt, an understudy of Wegner’s who had begun assuming some of his duties, quickly circulated a letter to Boys Town supporters calling the Sun “a kind of Shopper’s Guide.” It said, “There can only have been yellow journalism, prejudice, jealousy, and, for all I know, bigotry involved in the story,” suggesting that the motive was anti-Catholic bias. In fact, the reporters had bent over backward to avoid such a bias. Moreover, Schmitt said, the story was full of “snide innuendos” that cut into his vitals all “because of a cheap editor of a cheap paper, whose owner is himself a millionaire many times over.”43 Wegner also remained unrepentant.


George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, Defenestration of Prague, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fear of failure, invisible hand, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, one-China policy, one-state solution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Dean Acheson’s characterization of Hurley was apt: “Trouble moved with him like a cloud of flies around a steer.”8 Though there is no supporting record, Truman claimed in his memoir that he met with Hurley in the White House at 11:30 a.m. the next day about the “seriousness of the situation” in China and that Hurley assured him that he would “wind up a few personal matters and then return to China.”9 Later, during his weekly cabinet luncheon, an aide handed the president a scrap of yellow news copy that had been torn off the White House ticker tape machine. According to Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, Truman glanced at the news flash, held it up, and angrily said, “See what a son-of-a-bitch did to me?”10 Without informing the president, Hurley had released to the press a scathing letter of resignation, dated the day before, claiming that “career men” in the State Department continuously undermined his efforts to support the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by siding with “the Chinese Communist armed party” and “the imperialist bloc of nations” whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Even two of the better examples, sent by the Germans during World War I, have that “funny” sound that invariably accompanies them. The first, disguised as a press cable, read: PRESIDENT’S EMBARGO RULING SHOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE NOTICE, GRAVE SITUATION AFFECTING INTERNATIONAL LAW. STATEMENT FORESHADOWS RUIN OF MANY NEUTRALS. YELLOW JOURNALS UNIFYING NATIONAL EXCITEMENT IMMENSELY. The initial letters spell out Pershing sails from N. Y. June 1. The second message, apparently sent as a check on the first, beaded the same content on the second letters of each word: APPARENTLY NEUTRAL’S PROTEST IS THOROUGHLY DISCOUNTED AND IGNORED.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

There, bread became ‘the staff of life’ for Arabians, Persians and north Indians. The western sector was the sector of bread. But the eastern sector, from southern India across to the paddy fields of south-east Asia, was wedded to rice in a great variety of types: husky and round, thin and polished, even (once one reached China) white, brown, pink and yellow, new and old – this was considered the tastiest type.5 Grain surpluses, in wheat or rice, underwrote the political success of the states that emerged close to the ancient and medieval Indian Ocean – whether Sumer in Iraq, far back in the third and second millennia BC , or Angkor in Cambodia in the ninth to twelfth centuries AD .