CJR: Why We Love The Political Gabfest
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Though it is (broadly) a political analysis show, the Politcal Gabfest sometimes makes me laugh out loud. There was one evening last summer where I was that strange person on the subway, giggling maniacally, unable to stop as I listened to the show. The conversation had turned to dogs and mimes. You had to be there.
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.
The Julian Assange Show
Is now the time for a forty-year-old cyber activist to sell out?
To sell out, Assange would of course have to violate his ideals. Maybe he has, but it would be wrong to confuse the romantic view that he holds of the world with a rigid commitment to ideology or unwavering idealism. He is a charismatic figure precisely because of the way his contradictions—manifest in WikiLeaks from the start—magically seem to hold together: his self-absorption tempered by his more abstract, but genuinely felt, pursuit of justice; his inexperience or naïveté often masked by his autodidact’s intellect; his utopianism hemmed in by a do-what-it-takes view of combat; his search for hidden truths shrouded by his own secrecy and willingness to equivocate, if not lie. “When you are much brighter than the people you are hanging around with, which I was as a teen-ager, two things happen,” Assange told me while I was reporting “No Secrets,” a profile of him and of WikiLeaks that ran in this magazine two years ago. “First of all, you develop an enormous ego. Secondly, you start to think that everything can be solved with just a bit of thinking—but ideology is too simple to address how things work.”
At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Anthony Shadid Dies
The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied careers in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting, both of them for The Washington Post. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by The Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year.
We like to think Seamus spent his golden years in Canada, an outlaw, never setting foot in or on or even near an automobile again.
Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that you disagree with without throwing a fucking temper tantrum.
