I don’t think we need to worry that reverence and passion for the written word are going to die out with the coming of the digital revolution.

Certainly many of the writers who were (proudly) rejected by the New Yorker have no qualms about submitting their work for publication to silenceofthecity.com:

Rejection, of course, is simply a rite of passage for most writers. For Montandon, though, it formed the seed of an idea. Since there was no shortage of writers like him who’d tried and failed to make The New Yorker’s pages, he figured there was an abundance of unpublished Talk stories lying around New York City. About a year ago he set out to provide a home for the orphan submissions, quietly launching silenceofthecity.com, where he resurrects the unpublished contributions of Talk of the Town rejectees.

I link. You read.

Jeffrey Goldberg on Hezbollah (The New Yorker, 2002): here and here.

Al-Jazeera interview with Nasrallah two days ago: here.

Ha’aretz, an indispensable source of information, background, context, analysis, and speculation. Especially “What Will Happen Next?“

Recently, British Jews marked a milestone: 350 years of continuous coexistence with their gentile hosts and neighbors. (You can read a brief account of the Jews’ turbulent history in Britain here.)

Even after three and a half centuries, however, it is still an uneasy coexistence. Here’s a recent cartoon from the Guardian that portrays Jews bashing children in the face while they swat away pesky terrorist insects:

Oops! I guess cartoonist Martin Rowson meant that it’s Israelis who are bashing children.

“Yesterday’s cartoon [above] on page 29 (Comment) portrayed Israeli military action in Lebanon in the form of a mailed fist with Stars of David as knuckle-dusters. By failing to identify them in a specifically Israeli form - such as in the colours of the flag - the point the cartoon was making might have been interpreted as implicating Judaism rather than the Israeli government in the present conflict. That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.”

Dear Jewish readers: gird your loins for the Jew-baiting to come. Dark days ahead.

I’ve been following the war news mostly, so I missed this story in Thursday’s New York Times, called “Technology Rewrites the Book.” Print-on-demand technology has made it possible (and affordable) for civilians to create their own bound books.

Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover, and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just for that buyer. …
Blurb’s product will appeal to people searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.

Mr. Updike will be very unhappy. So many different kinds of peasants are breaching the fortress walls.

Lawrence Pintak, a news and media junkie who has been unplugged except during brief interludes during this past week, is completely underwhelmed by the coverage he did see.

As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre — and frustrating — experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited — and distorted — view of the world.

I run a center for television and new media at The American University in Cairo, which puts me at the crossroads of journalism in the Arab world. For me, monitoring a crisis like this would normally mean the voracious consumption of Arab and U.S. media — television, newspapers, Web sites and all the rest.

But for the first week of the war, I was on vacation in California with my family. That has meant catching glimpses of the conflict in bite-sized snatches on cable television between forays to Disneyland, trips to the beach and aquarium tours — much, I suspect, like many other Americans this summer.

At times, the coverage has seemed as much a fantasy as Disney’s Space Mountain, and the level of Middle East knowledge on the part of some television anchors only a few notches higher than that of the tattooed biker couple waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. [emphasis added]

Indeed. It isn’t possible to give a flavor of it to anyone who hasn’t been watching, so I won’t try.

Here’s a clip that’s on heavy rotation on CNN—Nic Robertson’s Excellent Hezbollah Adventure.

I’ve seen this remarkable footage at least three times. It leaves me slack-jawed each time. Here’s a taste:

Viewers saw Robertson in a blue shirt running amidst debris alongside the Hezbollah operative, who wore a red shirt. Robertson asked: “Where are we going now?”
Hussein Nabulsi, labeled on-screen as a “Hezbollah Press Officer”: “Now we are moving to where Israeli jet fighters bombed what it called Hezbollah headquarters.”
Robertson narrated: “In a reverse of recent policy, Hezbollah took CNN on an exclusive fast-paced tour of the most sensitive bomb sites.”
To Nabulsi: “You are really worried about another strike here right now, yes?”
Nabulsi: “Of course, of course.”
Robertson: “How dangerous is it in this area at the moment?”
Nabulsi: “It is very, very dangerous. It’s — we are now the most dangerous place in the most dangerous moment.”
Robertson: “In civilian housing.”
Robertson narrated: “Israel says it targets Hezbollah’s leadership and military structure. Hezbollah wanted to show us civilians are being hit.” At the base of a heavily-damaged multi-story concrete building, he asked Nabulsi: “What was here?”
Nabulsi gestured to the cameraman: “Just look. Shoot. It is civilians, buildings. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?”

Anyone who can claim with a serious face, as Neal Gabler (in a slightly different context) just did on Fox News, that “news is not entertainment,” that “it’s a responsibility to the public,” needs to come to his senses.

The audience’s lack of trust in the news is not news. Joshua Gamson, for example, was writing about it twelve years ago.

Read it here. It’s worth the time.

Executive summary: entertaining the audience is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you constantly wink at the audience, play with it, tease it, and suggest it should watch the “news” [say, about Nancy Kerrigan vs. Tanya Harding] with what Gamson calls “tabloid eyes” [i.e., skeptically], the audience will get used to watching all “news” with tabloid eyes. There’s a price to pay: news anchors and reporters and talking heads and pundits all become unreliable narrators.

The only comfort I can draw from the appalling spectacle of television news during this new Middle East crisis is that that audience is much smarter than the news producers—it long ago stopped trusting TV news to report facts in context and sequence.