Media, Pearl Harbor, Consciousness, Darkness, Hillary Clinton

Covering Trump: An Oral History

Shelley Hepworth et al | CJR | 22nd November 2016

Journalists reflect on lessons learned covering the Trump presidential campaign. “If you’re going to have such a damn long campaign, you need someone who can sustain the show for that long. You need someone who can provide plot turns. Donald Trump is the perfect person for that. This is a person who literally knows how to craft a TV show to last a full season, so if you make elections into this two-year spectacle, it should not be any surprise that the process produces a showman” (14,000 words)

Why Nobody Prepared For Pearl Harbor

Steve Twomey | Smithsonian Magazine | 22nd November 2016

The raid on Pearl Harbor was so audacious that the Japanese themselves doubted they would get away with it. “Even if there were no leaks from the Imperial Navy, the north Pacific was so vast that the strike fleet would be in transit almost two weeks, during which it might be discovered any minute. Success for Yamamoto’s raiders seemed 50-50, at best 60-40. Instead of adding a mission to Hawaii that might wipe out much of the Imperial Navy, many officers preferred to leave Pearl Harbor alone” (5,040 words)

The Challenge Of Consciousness

Tim Parks | New York Review of Books | 21st November 2016

Conversation about consciousness with philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti. “Instead of a world where we merely interact with external occurrences, we also have experience of the occurrence. This addition of experience would be puzzling enough in itself. But it is even more puzzling that experience is usually described as experience of something else. I experience a red apple. You experience a piece of music. How is this possible?” (2,300 words)

Night Moves

Amanda Petrusich | VQR | 6th July 2016

Pervasive light pollution from cities and highways ensures that most people in Europe and America never know real darkness, never see the night sky as their ancestors did, rarely see stars. “Most North Americans and Europeans live under Class 6 or 7 skies, in which the Milky Way is undetectable and the sky has been smudged by a ‘vague, grayish white hue’. In that kind of night, a person can wander outside, unfold a lawn chair, open a newspaper, and recite the headlines, if not the stories” (7,000 words)

Clinton Mastered The Science Of Politics But Forgot The Art

Sam Stein | Huffington Post | 21st November 2016

There are three basic parts to any political campaign. The first is to get potential voters registered. The second is to persuade them to vote for you. The third is to actually get them out to vote. The Clinton campaign concentrated on parts one and three, but failed at part two, the persuasion. “Their models showed that the best way to defeat Trump was to paint him as unqualified for the office of the presidency, which they successfully did. Voters just ended up not caring” (1,600 words)

Video of the day: Mr Night Has A Day Off

What to expect:

Light-hearted animation set in Vilnius (2’00”)

Thought for the day

One should use common words to say uncommon things
Arthur Schopenhauer