Kristof himself is a media decathlete: In addition to being a NY Times columnist, he has a blog on nytimes.com, updates his Facebook status daily, posts tidbits of news to Twitter — and all of this relates and refers to his “official” journalist work as a journalist for the Times. He also engages with his readers in comments, carrying on conversations about his posts. These different “touch points” — a term that I hate, but which seems appropriate here — allow him to test assumptions, get quick feedback, and share information that may not fit into the framework of an official column. They also gives readers ways to get more engaged with topics they care about, providing a variety of avenues for participation. Finally, they give readers more insight into the reporters themselves — their interests, their informal voices, their senses of humor.

Is insight good? Is “participation” good?

I don’t know. This humanization of news sources isn’t totally new, either. There have always been celebrity journalists like Kristof, and their greater exposure ensures the accrual of an identity more extensive than a mere by-line.

The difference is that this also happening at much more granular levels. My friend Leslie is a reporter for the Modesto Bee. She uses Twitter to post meta-news (@BeeReporter), and created a Facebook page (ReporterAlbrecht) to foster a community around her beat. At the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, the sports reporters record podcasts, comment on articles, and maintain blogs.

I personally love the new avenues of participation, but I wonder what the effect of all this will be. News has become more of conversation. Reporters are extending their identity into the public sphere, becoming distinct as individuals. Does this increase the value, authority, credibility, reach, or depth of the subsequent journalism?

We checked out SFMOMA’s 50th anniversary retrospective of The Americans today, and I was astonished at another of Frank’s skills: Grant-writing. In order to fund the gathering of the photos that became The Americans, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I’ve pasted his clear, simple, two-part essay below.

Part 1: Frank’s brief summary of the proposal

To photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively. The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present. This project is essentially the visual study of a civilization and will include caption notes; but it is only partly documentary in nature: one of its aims is more artistic than the word documentary implies.

Part 2: The full statement of intent

I am applying for a Fellowship with a very simple intention: I wish to continue, develop and widen the kind of work I already do, and have been doing for some ten years, and apply it to the American nation in general. I am submitting work that will be seen to be documentation—most broadly speaking. Work of this kind is, I believe, to be found carrying its own visual impact without much work explanation. The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic. The material is there: the practice will be in the photographer’s hand, the vision in his mind. One says this with some embarrassment but one cannot do less than claim vision if one is to ask for consideration.

“The photographing of America” is a large order—read at all literally, the phrase would be an absurdity. What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere. Incidentally, it is fair to assume that when an observant American travels abroad his eye will see freshly; and that the reverse may be true when a European eye looks at the United States. I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none, the farmer and his children, a new house and a warped clapboard house, the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and postoffices and backyards.

The uses of my project would be sociological, historical and aesthetic. My total production will be voluminous, as is usually the case when the photographer works with miniature film. I intend to classify and annotate my work on the spot, as I proceed. Ultimately the file I shall make should be deposited in a collection such as the one in the Library of Congress. A more immediate use I have in mind is both book and magazine publication.

Frank was awarded a fellowship, which amounted to $3,600, and he used this to travel in a long loop around the US in 1955-6. That “more immediate use” that he refers to in the final sentence turned into The Americans, a stunning document that is every bit as interesting 50 years later. The exhibition is captured in an extended version of The Americans, including contact sheets and commentary.

Hard to believe that this was 30 years ago, but here’s some excellent local news footage of a notorious moment in baseball history: the White Sox ill-fated “Disco Demolition” promotion. In the end, Comiskey Park descended into a riot after a Chicago DJ exploded a crate full of disco records in the middle of the field between games of a double-header. The NYT has a nice chronicle of the unfolding disaster:

[Mike] Veeck, [son of the White Sox owner], ordered yellow-jacketed guards to go outside to stop fans from crashing the gates.

That allowed the spectators inside the ballpark to storm the field without much resistance. Jack Morris, a Tigers pitcher, recalled “whiskey bottles were flying over our dugout” after Detroit won the first game, 4-1.

Then Dahl blew up the records.

“And then all hell broke loose,” Morris said. “They charged the field and started tearing up the pitching rubber and the dirt. They took the bases. They started digging out home plate.”

Watch for Greg Gumbel in the footage above; he was a sportscaster for a Chicago-area station.

This photo is from an excellent 70s photo book called Handmade Houses. I bought it after I read this inspiring little piece on Inhabitat, and it has got me thinking about getting back to basics. In this economy, basics may be all there are.

In the winter and spring of 1997, I helped my friend Steve make a house by hand on the California coast. At first, it was like Robinson Crusoe. No possessions to speak of, other than my hammer, some books, the sun and ocean, fresh air and work. We worked all day, doing what felt like good, wholesome labor in the sun, banging, sawing, sizing things up.

This is where I lived for a while.

Then El Nino arrived. After a few weeks, the whole thing had become more like Lord of the Flies. Days and days of rain, mudslides on Highway 1, crazy-making isolation. In between squalls, we framed the house, affixed the plywood sheathing, put on the deck and roof, and ran the wiring. At some point, I came down with a cold, which eventually became pneumonia.

In the spring, I retreated to the warmth of Doug and Ted’s house in Berkeley to recuperate, a few weeks later I’d taken a job at a museum, and that was the end of simplicity. For the time being, anyway.

I will only spread some love about my favorite MJ recording, which is a very scratchy demo version of “Working Day And Night” from the Special Edition of “Off the Wall.”

Enjoy.

Disorder. People fleeing. This was happening as the Tank Man, seemingly so calm, stood in the street. I also think it’s interesting that all the men in the photo are wearing — as a commenter on the NYT blog put it — “the same drab clothes.” A true illustration of how much has changed in China in the last 20 years.

The Roshomon-like details in all of the photographers’ stories are vivid and heartbreaking: “Vehicles were smoldering,” “a line of students facing a line of soldiers and a column of tanks,” “another volley of shots rang out from where the tanks were, and people began ducking, shrieking, stumbling and running,” “some guy in a white shirt runs out in front,” “a man waving two plastic shopping bags,” “waving his jacket and shopping bag,” “remonstrating with the tank driver in an act of defiance,” “he then disappeared into the crowd,” “the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away.”

And then what happened?

Charlie Cole: “I then placed the tank roll in a plastic film can and wrapped it in a plastic bag and attached it to the flush chain in the tank of the toilet.”

Stuart Franklin: “The film was smuggled out in a packet of tea by a French student and delivered to the Magnum office in Paris.”

Jeff Widener: “I gave all my rolls of film to [someone named] Kurt/Kirk who smuggled it back to the A.P. office in his underwear. The long-haired college kid was wearing a dirty Rambo T-shirt, shorts and sandals.”

Arthur Tsang Hin Wah: “A colleague rode over on a bike and picked up the film.”

And Terril Jones, the reporter who captured the shot at street level: “I never published them, and only showed them to a few friends and fellow reporters.”

And the rest is history. That keeps unfolding, I guess.

A community of practice. The practice of finding deals.

So, some industrious, deal-seeking shoppers have created LiveJournal communities in which shoppers can band together to save shipping costs from online retailers. These so-called “sprees” usually correspond to global shipping deals offered by a retailer, and they’re available until certain criteria are met — minimum amounts for the shipping deal, or whenever the spree-launcher decides to take care of the order.

In the above example, the spree is for a retailer called “Apparel,” it’s open, and there are 35 “comments,” many of which are actually “orders.” That’s right, you submit your order in a public space, so that others can see how close the spree is to being filled.

In order to build trust among their users, the community above provides a way to give feedback; they’ve created a separate community called “spreefeedback” where users leave comments about the trustworthiness of the users who launch the sprees. Hacky, but apparently effective. Pretty cool, huh?

On related notes, Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is filled with intriguing examples of everyday hacks in the physical world. Last summer, I wrote about my friends Kristen and Rob and their Flickr UI navigation cues that helped the non-savvy folks in their family find their wedding photo albums.

The caption reads: “Fig 15. REDWOOD (Sequoia sempervirens Endl.) Making the “undercut”, which determines the direction of the fall, on a tree 16 feet in diameter. Humboldt woods.” Photo: A.W. Ericson.

Amazon sells Trees of California for $75, but you can read it for free at Google Books. Cool.

(It’s possible that I’m taking this all far too seriously).

When I first joined Facebook, I dutifully wrote all of my status updates in the third person, as the format dictates. Because I am both a grammar snob and a rule-follower.

Rule-abiding: Doug … his

This construction is appropriate for the feed, but it’s also terribly awkward. Statuses are usually personal, “microblog-ish” bits of content, and it just sounds weird when personal stuff is written in the third person. Recently, I started to lapse into the first person in the body of the status, and while doing so, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.

Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug … my

But so far, there has been no condemnation forthcoming. Why? Maybe we all quickly become blind to the totally obvious disagreement? Or maybe it just makes cognitive sense that the content of the status will be in the first person? If the latter is true, how soon will we be updating Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?

The first budget, [Robert Nabors, an OMB veteran] told me, “was being designed with an eye toward what do we need to do to put the economy back on a more sustainable path? What do we need for economic growth? And what do we need to do in order to transform the country? Those were our overarching principles.” The budgeteers took a hyper-rational approach, attempting to determine policy and leave the politics and spin for later. He went on, “One of the things that would probably surprise people is that this wasn’t an effort where anybody created a top-line budget number and said, ‘This is the number that we have to hit, and that’s just that, and we’ll fit everything else in.’ Or, ‘We can’t go higher than x on revenue,’ or, ‘We can’t go higher than y on spending.’ It was more of a functional budget than anything else: ‘This is what we need to do. These are our principles. These are our core beliefs. And as a result this is what our budget looks like.’”

This is probably the kind of thing that gives nightmares to the teabaggers, but I love the idea of goal-oriented budget creation. Why not try to keep your eyes on the prize of actual tangible outcomes like sustainble economic growth when you’re wrangling the world’s most complicated spreadsheet into submission?

You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

Yelapa is a tiny village near Sayulita, Mexico, and the naming formula was concocted by Liana Maeby.

Say what you will about the Soviets, but you can’t argue with this reasoning for sending dogs, rather than monkeys, into space. If there’s one universal truth of dogs, it is that they are “suited to endure long periods of inactivity.” Lynne brought the subject of these Soviet cosmonaut dog-heroes to my attention, including those pictured at right — Belka (which “most likely means ‘Whitey,’” according to Wikipedia’s “Soviet space dogs” entry) and Strelka (”Arrow”). They were the first animals to go into orbit and return alive, spending August 19, 1960 in space before returning to Earth. Wikipedia helpfully adds that they were accompanied by some friends from the animal kingdom: “a grey rabbit, 42 mice, 2 rats, flies and a number of plants and fungi.”

All passengers survived.

(Thanks to Dan Mogford, who grabbed the image off a commemorative Soviet matchbox).

During one editing session, one of the Dickmans recalls an interview with former American poet laureate Mark Strand in which Strand cautions against relying on “clusters of words” that pop into your head … This sounded to me like a good rule of thumb for writing. (It also added fuel to the fire of my dislike of Twitter and Twitter-like tools that encourage people to offer half-cocked, cliche-ridden mini-opinions about everything.) I plundered the Internet in search of the interview.

Turns out that he was referring to a 2003 piece in Post Road Magazine. It was conducted by writer Michael O’Keefe. The relevant bit is the last passage from Strand, but the context is helpful:

Mark Strand: Nobody wants to arrive because that’s the end. One wants to have openings constantly before him so there are places to go.
Michael O’Keefe: Do you believe that sometimes words can get in the way when you write?
MS: Words do get in the way when you have heard them used in a particular manner before. When you write all you’ve got are words but they both get in the way and serve as a salvation.
MO: Do you avoid using any kind of combinations of words that you could remember easily?
MS: Yeah, I mistrust them because it means that they existed in that way before. The idea is to use a modifier-noun combination that may never have been used before. Otherwise you may be just quoting others or quoting yourself. The excitement comes when you have done something that was unthinkable before.

Amen, brother. Mistrust ease. Seek the unthinkable.

In my digging, I also found some excellent Strand resources, including a nice interview in a 1975 issue of Ploughshares and a very helpful page at the Library of Congress that eventually led to my discovery of the above interview.

So, all you tax protesters out there, tell me how this guy does it …

On the surface, the Hendricksons are typical suburbanites, living in a subdivision with manicured lawns and white picket fences and SUVs, continually weaving a protective cloak of lies when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world, hiding the fact that three seemingly independent families living side-by-side are actually one large, plurally married family. The husband, Bill, owns a Home-Depot-style super-store, so clearly he’s got some income, in addition to a variety of avenues to shelter that income. Each of the three wives lives in her own house. Bill lives with the first wife, Barb, and the other two wives — Nikki and Margie — live in the houses adjacent to Bill and Barb. Nikki and Margie both work part time, but they clearly don’t earn enough to cover living expenses — rent, taking care of the kids, etc.

We can assume that Bill owns all three houses. Maybe he “rents” houses to Nikki and Margie for a very reduced rate, and perhaps he also pays them a salary to be babysitters, or house cleaners? Still, you’d think that this sort of situation would be suspicious to the IRS, especially since they live in Salt Lake.

You’d also think that the Internet would have a lot of information about how polygamists can avoid income taxes, but, if it’s there, it’s not easily Google-able. How Stuff Works actually has an article called “How Polygamy Works,” which includes this bit:

The economics of polygamy can be hard on the families as well. Colorado City, Arizona, a strict polygamist enclave, suffers from severe poverty. The families are simply not able to make enough money to support all their wives and children. They rely heavily on welfare, and in some cases commit welfare fraud. The problem is so severe that Colorado City and similar communities put a serious strain on state welfare systems.

It would be even more suspicious, I would guess, if they collected welfare while living in a fancy subdivision.

So: Who has some insight here? How do they do it?

Confucius: To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, aka “Rumsfucious:” As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say: We know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. — Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Thoreau cites Confucius during a discussion of self-knowledge in Walden, and it reminded me of Ol Rummy. Looks like he was on to something deeper after all. I thought he was talking about intelligence, but he was really getting at “true knowledge.” Perhaps the US government should create a Central True Knowledge Agency? Speaking of true knowledge, the entirety of Walden is online.

If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, duh. War and Peace is available for the Kindle, but who wants to wrestle that monster through a keyhole? Anyway, last night, I downloaded the awkwardly named Kindle for the iPhone. I had tried to become a Kindle user (of the device — confusing, yes?). I failed at this, but I had some Kindle-ized books left over — Leaves of Grass and the Modern Library’s Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson — and I downloaded those. I didn’t really expect much.

Twice today, I found myself reading through sections of Leaves of Grass: “A PROMISE to California, / Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon: / Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love.” Good reading as I watched the lunch crowd at Mixt Greens. The entire Leaves of Grass is available on Bartleby, by the way. Then, as I was waiting for a conference call to start, I read Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance.” Hard to conduct a conference call with a mind thus expanded by poetry, but I think I can get used to it. Poetry on the iPhone! It makes a lot of sense, and Amazon did a nice job with the interface. Simple, to the point, no BS, just like reading should be.

If you haven’t been to San Juan Bautista, you need to go. It’s a little ways south of San Jose, an hour east of Big Sur, a long but not impossible trip from San Francisco. Mara and I were there last winter, and I keep meaning to spread the word. It’s a real getaway with good old-fashioned California heritage and big cacti and a nice bakery and a good vibe.

Chickens running around.

What can you say? SJB got style.

It’s also got a mission, and it’s in the heart of artichoke country. They say that hard times are when the big ideas really take hold. Maybe it’s time to get that marimba you’ve always wanted.