![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
Are nonprofit, online newsrooms the future of journalism? I’ll bet on it. On The Media discusses it this week:
Small, web-only, not-for-profit newsrooms are springing up around the country and scooping much larger dailies with nuts-and-bolts reporting. Voice of San Diego, for example, has managed to uncover a handful of government scandals in the past few [...]
Entries Tagged as 'media'
Future of Journalism Is Nonprofit & Online
3
November 22, 2008 at 8:21am
by Mark Willis
Throw Away That Powdered Wig!
3
November 13, 2008 at 8:12pm
by Mark Willis
the cluetrain manifesto, thesis #15:
In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
WWTFD? (What Would Tina Fey Do?)
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October 11, 2008 at 8:44am
by Mark Willis
Not tonight on Saturday Night Live. We have a pretty good idea where she’s headed with that, and it will surely involve a little red meat. No, what would TF do when she reaches for a SoyJoy? (No one, alas, paid me for this product placement.) New York Magazine editor Emily Nussbaum discusses it on [...]
David Foster Wallace’s Long-form Journalism
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September 23, 2008 at 6:00am
by Mark Willis
I must confess, as did On The Media’s Bob Garfield, that until last week “I’d never read a single word of David Foster Wallace’s work because he’s reputed as a novelist to be very dense and difficult, along Thomas Pynchon/James Joyce lines, and I didn’t even know he did journalism. But …, I’ve been [...]
media · writing Add Your Comment
Hip-Hopping With The Big Bang
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September 10, 2008 at 7:28pm
by Mark Willis
Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research institute in Geneva, fired up the Large Hadron Collider at 4:27 a.m. EDST. For the record, the world did not end then, as some Luddites feared. That could still happen several weeks from now when a beam of subatomic particles coursing one way through the collider smashes into [...]
Big Bang · media · science Add Your Comment
MiT6: Stone & Papyrus, Storage & Transmission
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August 8, 2008 at 12:10am
by Mark Willis
The Media in Transition 6 conference (MiT6) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is scheduled for April 24-26, 2009. The conference theme is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission.” The deadline for submitting proposals is January 9, 2009.
Ms. Modigliani and I went to MiT5 in 2007, and we found it to be one of [...]
Ms. Modigliani · accessibility · conferences · fair use · media Add Your Comment
The Times — Are They A-Changin’?
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July 22, 2008 at 2:14pm
by Mark Willis
JibJab is back with a new satirical video for the 2008 election — Time for Some Campaignin’. JibJab seemed to invent the Internet video mashup in 2004 with This Land!, which presaged YouTube by two years. Now JibJab has a YT channel and a commercial site. According to their YT profile:
Brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis [...]
media · politics · pop culture · satire Add Your Comment
The Daisy Ad: ‘Either Love Each Other, Or Die’
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June 18, 2008 at 12:15am
by Mark Willis
I remember the daisy ad. Anyone alive in 1964 has to remember. What I didn’t realize until the death of its creator, Tony Schwartz, is the fact that it was broadcast as a TV ad only once. After that, it was news. Then it became a legend.
I was nine years old. I wouldn’t admit to [...]
1960s · media · memoir · politics · rhetoric Add Your Comment
‘Born Without Earlids’: Tony Schwartz (1923-2008)
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June 18, 2008 at 12:05am
by Mark Willis
Media consultant Tony Schwartz died in New York June 15 at age 84. While he is best known for the legendary “daisy” TV ad that evoked nuclear madness in the 1964 Presidential election, I like to think of him as a flaneur who loved the ambient sounds of his city and knew how to play [...]
NPR · NYT · New York · Playing by Ear · media · pop culture Add Your Comment