Jim S. is right, I need more nominees for Most Embarrassing Sentence in Major Media, 2013.

He says:

I think if you're looking for the most embarrassing quote in major media, you can do no better than this description of Huma Abedin that Instapundit draws attention to:

She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.

Ultra-close readers of this blog with great memories know that I defended that sentence — and some sentences around it — as "so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press."

So prod me toward some other nominees.

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Most Embarrassing Sentence in Major Media, 2013.

And the first nominee is:

But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.

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"Bezos believes that a big reset button is being hit on the media ecosystem."

"And the old models don’t work. So there’s plenty of room and opportunity for new models to be created," says Businessweek senior writer Brad Stone, whose book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," coming out in October, needs updating.

We’re so dominated in our world by our media organizations getting smaller and losing money, and yet to him it’s always been clear that this is an opportunity for more experimentation. So this does fit within that framework.

But Stone thinks the acquisition might be less about the monetizing old media on the web and more about "buying a lot of political influence."

And we can’t discard the fact that Amazon hasn’t been an enormous player, at least up until the dispute over sales taxes, and in buying The Washington Post, he has a seat at the table. And I think particularly legislators and anti-trust regulators are gonna be weighing the dominance of Amazon a lot in the years ahead.

Here's Stone's book, which you can pre-order, obviously at Amazon, which happens to be the best way to monetize a blog, through its Associates program, which you know I participate in. (Feel free to enter Amazon through my portal if you're inclined to buy something and simultaneously express appreciation for my writing.)

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Bezos and the WaPo paywall.

"Last March, the Washington Post put up a metered paywall, charging readers who access more than 20 articles a month," but Jeff Bezos, who just bought WaPo, has said, "On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change." So what's going to happen?

While Bezos may not interfere with editorial, it is within his role as owner to see the paper to profitability. If Bezos thinks paywalls are misguided, we may see the Washington Post drop theirs.

Bezos did not think Kindle was the salvation of papers, since “the problem is that many readers still prefer the printed version.”...

Interestingly enough, Bezos says “We [Amazon] realized that people are willing to pay for newspaper subscriptions on tablets. In the near future, every household will have multiple tablets. That’s going to be the default and will provide momentum for newspapers, too,” so we may see some creative subscription models on the Kindle or bundled with other products.

Meanwhile, over at the NYT, where they're struggling to adapt to the web, there's this huge and immediately obsolete "Fashion & Style" piece from last Sunday — "The Next Edition: Katharine Weymouth Takes Charge at the Washington Post" — which is full of fashion inanity like this:

Ms. Weymouth’s penchant for showing off her athletic figure — she arrived for a photo shoot in a crisp white sleeveless sheath and four-inch lime green Jimmy Choos — provokes titters in the newsroom. Then again, she works hard for it; [Molly Elkin, Ms. Weymouth’s best friend] said the two spend Sunday mornings doing free weights and “boy push-ups” with a personal trainer.

But has some decent foreshadowing of what was about to happen:

Quick-witted and no-nonsense, Ms. Weymouth is more like her steely grandmother than her famously demanding and mercurial mother. But since becoming publisher in February 2008, she has had a rocky ride; she has already hired her second editor, and critics lament that she is presiding over a newspaper in retreat.

The NYT article on the Bezos deal — "A Mogul Gets a Landmark in the Capital" — doesn't mention Weymouth.

Mr. Bezos has indulged his passion for space by financing the recovery from the seabed of an Apollo rocket that carried the first men to the moon. He is paying for creation of a clock buried in a mountain in West Texas that will tick once a year for the next 10,000 years. And now, Mr. Bezos — a man known for being an unsentimental businessman — has invested squarely in a sentimental business steeped in tradition....

“It’s an old boring story — rich man buys a newspaper — but in this instance it’s one of the richest men ever buying one of the most important newspapers ever, which is the one our government leaders read first thing every morning,” said Dennis Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House, a well-regarded small publisher. “This is the capper in the development of one of the most powerful vertical monopolies in our history, which is also one of the most controlling in matters of cultural concern.”

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"The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos..."

"... ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations."

Wow! What an amazing moment of transition in media this is. The new overcomes the old. It's not Amazon that will own WaPo, but Bezos himself, individually.

I hope he gets rid of the paywall.

For much of the past decade... the paper has been unable to escape the financial turmoil that has engulfed newspapers and other “legacy” media organizations. The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies...

Bezos, in an interview, called The Post “an important institution” and expressed optimism about its future. “I don’t want to imply that I have a worked-out plan,” he said. “This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation.” He said, “There would be change with or without new ownership. But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

ADDED: It seems as though the Bezos idea should be to forget about making money — like Citizen Kane — and simply plunge into making a great newspaper. Bezos doesn't need to make money. He can be simply spending money. Do what is good! What else should he do at this point? And even when Amazon was being developed, the need to make money soon was considered a distraction, if I remember correctly. He had the nerve to put that off way into the future. Here's the "Citizen Kane" scene this makes me think of:



"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."

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Feminist blogger suspects that the AP meant to say "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

You may remember this story from yesterday, which I blogged here, about the NYC ad executive who leaned against her balcony railing in a way that made her date say "You know, you shouldn't do that." She said "I do it all the time," and then the railing collapsed, and she fell 17 stories and died. When should a death make the news and why? I know why I chose to blog that one: It was such a striking reminder of the way death might come at any time, and one's confidence that death won't come because it hasn't come yet — I do it all the time — is a delusion we live by and might die by.

I'm not afraid to lie down at night and sleep — I actively seek the loss of consciousness on those occasions — because I always wake up in the morning. That's happened every time so far anyway. And yet, every day, there are — lying in beds all over the world — dead bodies of human beings who surrendered consciousness to sleep the night before, assuming it would work out the same way it did all those other times.

How many will get AP stories written? None, unless they happen to be famous. The railing giving way is dramatic, especially because it happened to someone we can see did not expect it, who had that youthful sense of invulnerability, and the fall came from a great height, the death was instant, and there was an onlooker to make the experience come alive for us vicariously.

Like any blog, a feminist blog must feed on the available news stories or die of starvation, but a feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism. So here's the Slate's XXfactor blog, and the determination has been made that the falling woman story is bloggable, which has to mean that it's fodder for feminism. Extracting 4 facts from the opening 2 paragraphs of the AP story, L.V. Anderson writes that the "implication" is that "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

A reader is left with the distinct impression that if [Jennifer] Rosoff hadn’t invited her date inside, hadn’t gone outside to smoke a cigarette, and hadn’t defied the advice of the wise and logical man she was with, she would still be alive. According to the AP story’s subtext, the problem wasn’t that Rosoff’s balcony railing was shoddy and unsafe—it was that Rosoff defied gender norms by being unmarried at 35, by being sexually liberal, and by insisting on making her own decisions instead of deferring to men’s logic.

Defied gender norms! Oh, come on.

You may accuse me of overreacting...

Anderson knew readers would call bullshit, but what's she supposed to do? Her assignment is to find feminist fodder and chew it up into a bolus of feminism, something we're supposed to swallow. She switches to I know this sounds like bullshit mode because she knows it sounds like bullshit.

... but the minor details that journalists choose to include or exclude from their reporting are one of many subtle ways that oppressive gender norms are perpetuated. 

Is that straight out of her notes from a Women's Studies class? This platitude is the platform for many a feminist blog. Scan stories for minor details relating to gender, then highlight them, and make grandiose statements about the perpetuation of oppression. When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.

Do I think the AP reporter assigned to this piece (incidentally, a woman) intended to undermine the reader’s sympathy for Rosoff and suggest she was asking for it? Of course not. But the fact that totally irrelevant details about Rosoff’s love life and cigarette habit made it into the lede and nut graf of an ostensibly unbiased news article—and that no editor stopped to ask, “Hmm, why is this information here?”—just goes to show how deeply ingrained sexist attitudes can be, even among professionals who pride themselves on their objectivity.

Bloggers don't have editors. A blogger has to self-edit. And Anderson is sort of self-editing here by imagining the readers' skepticism. But she counts on us accepting that the details are "totally irrelevant" and therefore only evince sexism. And that just goes to show how deeply ingrained the belief in deeply ingrained sexist attitudes can be. The railing against which Anderson has leaned so heavily — which feminist blogging calls upon her to do all the time — gives way. It's so shoddily constructed that any alternative explanation for the inclusion of the details pulls out the railing and sends Anderson tumbling.

And here the details create a vivid picture of a young woman in the midst of life who isn't thinking at all about death, and death suddenly takes her. She's on a first date, she's having a smoke, she's enjoying her luxurious abode looking out on the big city, she's openly dismissive of the man's fear of death, and she's inviting that man into her style of being truly alive, and that's when she dies. It's a stunning story of life and death. Yes, there's some "victim-blaming" here, but that's not necessarily a feminist problem. That cuts straight to everyone's fear of death: Would I have leaned on the railing? Have I ever leaned on railings at great heights? I don't want to die, so not leaning on railings must go on my How not to die checklist as I go forward in my life which, thus far, has not included my dying, and yet, somewhere, up ahead, there's that railing that's going to give way for me, and I too will plunge, headlong into the eternal unknown. 

I laugh out loud when I see that Anderson chides reporters for not "scanning one’s writing for traces of chauvinism," which, she says, "requires a little time and humility," but is "not exactly hard." Instead of seeing how she might take the time and have the humility to scan her own writing for traces of bullshit about chauvinism, she offers her idea of how AP should have put its opening paragraphs. Even though she admits that her version is much duller — "less salacious" — she's pleased that "it conveys the fact that Rosoff’s death was a tragic accident, not an instance of cosmic justice."

If you don't want the theme of cosmic justice, don't use the word "tragic." As we human beings tell each other stories — in theater or in the news — we experience depth of feeling when the details seem to tie together and have meaning. Why do we read about things like this at all? Anderson meant to say that her version of the story is better because it conveys the fact that Rosoff’s death was a random accident, which makes it a worse story. It's more of a police report, or notes for the tort litigation against the owner of the apartment building.

But Slate's feminist blog isn't about random accidents and building design defects. It is committed to getting us excited about the subtle perpetuation of the oppression of women. Ironically, Anderson herself fully intends to do what it is the feminist blog's mission to do: Take the stories of the day and retell them in terms of cosmic justice.

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"TV reporter fired for ‘tell-all’ blog about going bra-less on air."

Headlines The Daily News, but I think these 2 items were the real problem:

6. I'm frightened of old people and I refuse to do stories involving them or the places they reside....

9. If you ramble and I deem you unnecessary for my story, I'll stop recording but let you think otherwise.

That and the fact that after they told her to take the post down and she did, she re-posted it, saying "No Apologies" and "momentarily misguided about who I am and what I stand for." Items #6 and #9, above, undercut her ability to do ordinary, professional reporting. The re-posting and the self-publicizing reflect a decision to leverage a different kind of writing career, and we'll see what happens with that.

She's Shea Allen, and she's too cheeky for Huntsville, Alabama.

I had to decide whether to make a tag for her name, and I decided not to, so that's my bet on what happens with this.

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"I'm trying my best not to be cynical, but: Is subtracting context par for the course for NYT editorialists?"

"In this case it was almost as if the columnist was so eager to seize upon the Godwin's reference that she failed to even attempt to comprehend why Scalia said what he did, and instead relied on knee-jerk preconceptions to inform her judgement. If that's not the epitome of bias there, I don't know what is."

A comment, at an Instapundit post about my supplying the NYT with the context it missed. But I only had the context because when I wrote about the NYT piece, someone who was at the conference emailed me with a detailed account. That information wanted to be heard, and somehow I was the portal for it. I think the NYT had to be actively looking for crap to throw at Scalia and keeping its door shut to the flow of information. And I think my blogging the context only resulted in a correction because it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, and that got the NYT's attention, but initially only to try to shrug off the problem:

@jamestaranto @joshtpm What's the correction? Joking about Godwin's Law?
— Juliet Lapidos (@julietlapidos) July 24, 2013

Only joking. Ha ha. Get it. Joking about the Holocaust. Heh heh. What's the problem?

Taranto kept up the pressure: "Ahhh, I did not realize your post was comedy!" And the NYT thought better of its don't-you-get-the-Holocaust-jokes stance and put up the correction.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall, the other target of Taranto's tweet, stood his ground: "Again, anything in the Althouse post that in any way contradicts my post? Or are you just trolling?" And: "Hey Jim, You might want to read what I actually wrote since nothing in that post contradicts it." That is: So what if I left out the context as long as I didn't have any incorrect statements?

Context is a funny topic. Remember when Andrew Breitbart was pilloried for quoting Shirley Sherrod out of context?

Context itself must be understood in context. If your rules about putting quotes in context depend on whether you're quoting people you like or people you hate, then you are a hack. I think both Marshall and Lapidos showed themselves to be hacks here, but at least Lapidos or the organization that controls her is ashamed when exposed and tries to cover its tracks. Marshall is out and proud.

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Why I pay to get through the paywall at the NYT but not the Washington Post.

I'm looking for material to link to from this blog, and if I link to the NYT, my readers can click through to the article without hitting the paywall. That doesn't happen at the Washington Post, so I don't want to spend time reading there. Before WaPo put up the paywall, I had not subscribed to the NYT. I had migrated over to the Washington Post to find material that wasn't obstructed. But when the Post put up the paywall that blocks readers arriving at specific pages through links, it sent me back to the NYT, where I subscribed.

It's one thing to have a paywall, quite another to have a link-deflecting paywall.

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The NYT public editor: "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture..."

"... and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive."

Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”

That's a lot more than awareness to not fitting in. It's hard to fit in with people you are attacking.

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Helen Thomas, dead at 92.

"Thomas was the the first woman to join the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first woman to serve as its president. She was also the first female member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's historic press group."

ADDED: Clicking on my "Helen Thomas" tag, I can see things in a form not to be found in the obituaries:

1."'Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades.'Jonah Goldberg tells us how he really feels about Helen Thomas..."

2. James Taranto calls "metaphor alert" on Helen Thomas, while using the "crazy old aunt in the attic" metaphor against her.

3. Helen, still on fire at 89: "Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn’t control [the media]. They didn’t try. What the hell do they think we are, puppets? They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.... When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you. I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well — for the town halls, for the press conferences. It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."

4. "Longtime White House scribe Helen Thomas caused more than a few eyebrows to perk up when video surfaced on Friday of her declaring that Jews should 'get the hell out of Palestine' and go back to Germany and Poland.'"

5. "At the Helengoyle Café" had this photoshop by Palladian (done after what you see at #4):

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"One moment you’re sitting at home watching CNN, and the next you’re a basket case..."

"... because your television is locked on a steady stream of Chinese Communist Party propaganda."

It’s entirely possible that the Global Times -- hardly a paragon of journalistic integrity -- got the story wrong, and the Gaoxin VII isn’t designed to induce nervous collapse. It's also possible, probable in fact, that Chinese Communist propaganda can't induce such a fit.

Here's what the Global times wrote:

“When carrying out a mission, the airplane [the Gaoxin VII] will use its own ‘programs’ to forcefully overpower enemy television stations, radio stations and wireless communication networks, interfere with the enemy's propaganda dissemination programs, affect the enemy's military-civilian morale, and create rumors and confusion, thus causing the enemy, from government to everyday citizens, to have ‘nervous breakdowns’ and achieving their goal of rendering them helpless and unable to fight.”

That's hilarious... until it's not.

Can we just get this as a movie?

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"I just feel bad because I don't like when race gets out in the media because I don't think the media has a pure heart, as I call it."

"There are very few people have a pure heart when it comes to race. Racism is wrong in any, shape, form.... I think sometimes when people talk about racism, they say only white people are racist. There are a lot of black people who are racist. I don't like when it gets out there in the media because I don't think the media has clean hands... [T]he main thing I feel bad for, it gives every black and white person who is racist a platform to vent their ignorance. That's the thing that bothers me the most..."

Said Charles Barkley.

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"A protestor in Oakland throws a trash can at a window in the wake of the verdict."

At a window. I guess it didn't break or we'd have a picture of that. And how do I even know that isn't a posed picture? Amazing that the AP photographer was right there as the trashcan hurler was in the fully extended position and the can was arcing vividly at the window with papers photogenically flying backward across the arc. How do I know the protester/"protester" didn't aim right at the metal frame between those windows to make sure there'd be no real damage? Interesting that he's bundled up in such warm clothing on a summer night.

And look at this guy and his sign:



The image of ineffectuality. I love the ellipsis in "Geoge [sic] Zimmerm..." It's like: Ah, you know the rest. Zimmerm...

The photographers went out prowling the streets, to track down young black men who they expected to find committing crimes. Isn't that ironic? And look what they found — this old guy with his "Zimmerm..." sign and the trashcan hurler?

ADDED: The trashcan at the window photograph is so: Hey, could you do that trashcan through the window thing like Mookie in "Do the Right Thing"?

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The Zimmerman trial needs to be more about race! Quick, call the sociologist!

The NYT frontpages this execrable article by Lizette Alvarez, titled "Zimmerman Case Has Race as a Backdrop, but You Won’t Hear It in Court." She begins with the assumption that the case is supposed to be about race. After all, that's the way it looked in the press when it was first reported.

But in the courtroom where George Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder, race lingers awkwardly on the sidelines, scarcely mentioned but impossible to ignore.

What does that look like — race lingering awkwardly and impossible to ignore?

It's a trial! There are rules of evidence, and there's the whole concept of criminal justice, which involves an accusation, based on specific law, about a specific incident and exactly what this particular defendant did.

It's not about larger narratives and how this might fit into a template that we think explains some larger social scheme. To suggest that it should and that something's wrong with the trial if it does not is to get it exactly backwards.

For African-Americans here and across the country, the killing of Mr. Martin, 17, black and unarmed, was resonant with a back story steeped in layers of American history and the abiding conviction that justice serves only some of the people.

Seeing one event steeping in layers of history and within the context of abiding convictions is the very mechanism of prejudice. But the NYT is, apparently, sorry the trial isn't a festival of prejudicial thinking! How to write that up into an article? Call in the sociologist:

“For members of the African-American community, it’s a here-we-go-again moment,” said JeffriAnne Wilder, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Florida. “We want to get away from these things, but this did not happen in a vacuum. It happened against the backdrop of all the other things that have happened before.”

It's not awkward to shunt the backdrop of all the other things that have happened before to the sidelines during a trial. Rather, it's precisely what the judge and lawyers and jurors are required to do.

Yet inside a Seminole County courtroom, with the prosecution’s case against Mr. Zimmerman now over, race only occasionally punctuated the proceedings. 

Yet?! No! Race should not be put where it isn't relevant under the rules of evidence. Punctuation like that would violate the norms of a criminal trial. The backdrop of all the other things that have happened before is reason for Americans — especially black Americans — to care about these norms.

For supporters of the Martin family, Mr. Martin’s death was part of a more complex tale of profiling and injustice. 

But trials are not to be transformed into a "more complex tale." They are to be kept focused on the specific incident under consideration. And those who care about the more complex tale ought see the connection between their concern and the law's insistence on that focus.

... The charge is second-degree murder, inflicting death with spite, hatred or ill will. But no one in the courtroom is saying outright that race or racial hatred entered into the shooting.

They're not saying it outright because witnesses have to testify about what they actually heard and saw on this occasion. It's not as if something is being suppressed and hidden. Talking only about the evidence is the way to shed light and bring clarity to the task of deciding what happened.

In the cocoon of the courthouse, even Mr. Martin’s bullet-scarred hooded sweatshirt, positioned for jurors in a clear plastic frame, appeared less a poignant symbol for the thousands who marched in his name than a lamentable but necessary piece of evidence.

For the NYT, the courtroom is a "cocoon," and somehow reality resides in the minds of the throngs who feel the poignancy.

Still, black pastors, sociologists and community leaders said in interviews that they feared that Mr. Martin’s death would be a story of justice denied, an all-too common insult that to them places Trayvon Martin’s name next to those of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo and other black men who were abused, beaten or killed by police officers.

This suggests that Zimmerman should be convicted because of the poignant feelings about all these other people.

“[Rachel Jeantel] was mammyfied,” said Ms. Wilder, the sociology professor, expressing disappointment over the reaction. “She has this riveting testimony, then she became, overnight, the teenage mammy: for not being smart and using these racial slurs and not being the best witness. A lot of people in the African-American community came out against her.”

I guess I need to look up the race-studies technical term "mammyfied." I don't remember Mammy — in "Gone With The Wind," for example — being dumb.* Interesting that it's the sociology professor promoting the use of stereotypes. We should be rising above the stereotypes and treating people as individuals, and trials are designed to do that. This resistance to the workings of the criminal trial are truly deplorable, and it almost seems intended to exacerbate the terribly sad feelings of grievance that come from the larger historical context. Fair trials should be understood as a remedy for all the other things that have happened before. To present the fair trial as additional wounding is truly execrable.
______________________________

* "[T]he mammy was often illiterate though intelligent in her own sense. Among many of the slaves, there could have been a mammy who possessed the abilities to read and write, often taught to her by the children of the family for whom she worked.... [M]ost of her intelligence was a result of past experiences and conflicts. In particular, a mammy of an aristocratic family could be identified by her air of refinement."

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"Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels."

"Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe' -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."

An old quote that crosses my mind as I realize I have yet to check the news this morning.

Do you recognize that quote? It's from the oft-quoted "Walden," and I'm amused to see the next paragraph:

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. 

Read in isolation, that sounds like Henry David Thoreau foresaw email and the internet, but, in fact, he's at the opposite end of the technology spectrum:

To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life... that were worth the postage. 

I have written 34,859 posts on Blogger — this is #34,860 — and they were surely worth the "postage," since I have paid $0.00 to write to you like this.

The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. 

Boldface added.

If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. 

But a man on a vintage tractor was killed by a vintage firetruck in a 4th of July parade, and a cop shot the Rottweiler of a man he was arresting for photography the other day, and what's happening with those 17-year cicadas? Surely, these details from elsewhere need to be uploaded into our furiously grinding cogs of cognition.

One is enough. 

If you've read one dead dog story, you've read them all.

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. 

In my defense, I am an old woman. I've had coffee, and have moved on to water. Are you a philosopher? The test is: Do you think all news is gossip?

Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. 

What news stories are you reading this morning that might just as well have been written a year ago?

As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions...

All these people that you mention/Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame/I had to rearrange their faces/And give them all another name...

.... they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers -- and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

What's the news from Egypt?

What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news."

All these Chinese names you mention... presumably, what's the news of how to spell them today?

"Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week -- for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one -- with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?"

What is the fit conclusion to your ill-spent week?

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