"A little boy… sent me a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
— Maurice Sendak, from a Gawker obit Wild Things: Drawings, Quotes and Memories from Maurice Sendak
A female CIS student on the proposed “brogrammer” T-shirts that generated controversy in the CIS@Penn group.
[Strong opponent of the shirts] is right: it is a problem that there are students on both sides, and only one side is speaking up, so here goes. I think the “Brogrammer” idea is very funny. I also think that it’s sexist and that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Sexism, racism and every other *ism can appear on many levels. Just because most of us didn’t look at the shirt and immediately shout “That’s totally sexist!” doesn’t mean that it isn’t a little bit sexist.
I think there is/was a lot of resistance to getting rid of the shirt because we like it, and I don’t find that strange. But the fact of the matter is, the whole idea behind “brogramming” is to draw parallels between the (male) frat scene, and the CS scene. Does that mean women can’t appreciate the joke? No. Does it mean that the women in this thread have no sense of humor? Of course not.
Even though this is not an issue of belligerent, directed, stop-the-presses sexism, deep down it still plays into the idea that CS is a male field. It’s also a really funny joke and I’m sad to see it go. But I think that in order to eliminate the perception of CS as a field that is not friendly to women, we have to actively combat sexism in all its forms, not just the obvious forms that are convenient to us. It’s easy to say we’re against sexism in CS when we have something awful to be against; it’s a lot harder to say we’re against it if we genuinely like the idea that’s causing the problem.
"Cuando la injusticia se convierte en ley, la resistencia se convierte en deber."
adj. At the point of death, or in terminal decline.
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. … And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. … You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
— Ira Glass on stoytelling, part 3 of 4
"
There’s more here than just an old journalist’s lament over his dying profession, or over the social cost of losing great newspapers and great TV-news operations. And there’s more than an argument for the ethical superiority of honest, disinterested reporting over advocacy. Even an eager and ambitious political blogger like Richmond, because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of finding something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those—and this is the key—who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.
This is what H. L. Mencken was getting at when he famously described his early years as a Baltimore Sun reporter. He called it “the life of kings.”
"
— Mark Bowden, “The Story Behind the Story,” The Atlantic
"In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise—only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn’t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn’t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn’t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport."
— Mark Bowden, “The Story Behind the Story,” The Atlantic
