The NPR.org audience has grown dramatically in recent years, to between 25 and 35 million unique visitors each month. But far less than 1% of that audience is commenting, and the number of regular comment participants is even smaller. Only 2,600 people have posted at least one comment in each of the last three months –– 0.003% of the 79.8 million NPR.org users who visited the site during that period.
But such a number also suggests how effectively some of the nastier people in our society have employed comment threads — and Twitter — as their megaphones. So if we’re going to avert an outright tragedy of the online commons, we’ll need to find ways to reduce the influence of those people to a level commensurate with their actual representation in the population. NPR’s closure of comments is a step in the right direction.
You can barely get a hearing anymore unless you plan to burn everything to the ground (as long as Twitter and Snapchat are left unscathed so the revolution can be broadcast). From presidential campaigns to campus politics to the entrepreneurial penchant for “creative destruction,” an almost flippant craving for revolution mobilizes voters, consumers, and even slacktivists who rarely consider just who pays the price for their revolution or that their revolutionary energy feeds on stability.
The soil-collection project is part of a plan to erect the first national memorial to lynching victims, to be built on six acres of vacant land in downtown Montgomery. The project will cost twenty million dollars, and will include a museum at E.J.I. headquarters. It will transform the look, and perhaps the reputation, of Montgomery. A key part of the plan is a dare to the communities in which the lynchings took place. ‘We’re going to name thousands of people who were the victims of lynchings,’ Stevenson told the group before they received their trowels and jars. 'We’re going to create a space where you can walk and spend time and go through that represents these lynchings. But, more than that, we’re going to challenge every county in this country where a lynching took place to come and claim a memorial piece—and to erect it in their county.’
[gallery] dzajn:
Architektura na ścianie? Fantastyczne ozdoby wykonane przez braci Chisel & Mouse.Zdjęcia: archatlas.
Architecture on your wall? Fantastic hanging models of buildings designed and hand made by a pair of talented brothers from Chisel & Mouse.Images by archatlas.
excerpt from my Sent folder: Wendell Berry
About Berry, first of all, I don’t think he has ever had an especially broad audience — his message is too discomfiting for that. And while I approve and even celebrate the message, I don’t think there’s anything specially Christian about it. Berry, it seems to me, is a reincarnation of an early Roman: he worships his household gods, and if the Bible happens to say anything that supports the worship of those gods, he quotes it, and insofar as it does not, he ignores it. Like Rachel, he would have smuggled the teraphim in the baggage rather than trust wholly in the God of Israel. St. Paul’s talk of the cosmopolitanism of one whose politeuma is in heaven — I don’t think we’ll hear from Wendell about that, though I am immensely grateful for what we do hear from him.
excerpts from my Sent folder: whaddaboutism
Thanks for this response. One of the things I have inadvertently done with that essay is to make people think of Christian Public Intellectual as a kind of pigeonhole, and then they want to argue about who fits in the pigeonhole. That was not my intention at all, though I don’t know how I could have written the essay in a way that didn’t create that kind of debate. To me, the point of the essay was to describe a divergence in cultures, and therefore in languages, in such a way that we no longer have people who are clearly recognized, by the church and by the larger culture alike, as authoritative mediators between those cultures. So I don’t think it’s possible for anyone today to play the kind of role that Lewis and Niebuhr and Murray, in their various ways, played. (For good or ill.) To propose someone today as a plausible candidate for that role is to deny the historical thesis of the essay tout court. Which of course can be done! — but I don’t think it can be done by whaddaboutism, by “What about X?”
Brett Foster, “Back to School Rondeau”
It’s almost time to set aside the waning
distractions of first youth, the life contained
for years at home. What’s home? The place you grow
out of, everything receding slowly,
fading like a chalked sidewalk in the rain.
Leave childish things behind, said a certain
fellow. (Others afterward.) Don’t remain:
the friends gone late in summer let you know
it’s almost time.
Don’t leave behind new clothes, impromptu plans —
they’ll match surroundings well, remind again
of shining coming: new homes to let go
of, too; the best things said; mind’s overflow;
surprising callings; time for love, and pain.
It’s almost time.
— here. Many a day I spent with Brett getting ready for a new term, a new year. How I miss him.
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“Shaded Rocks, West Texas”, woodcut, Max-Karl Winkler
take it to the bank
Whenever a college or professional football player commits some act of violence — against a woman, against a dog, against some dude in a bar at two in the morning, against an opponent on or off the field — here’s what the coaching staff and other team officials say:
- "We take offenses like this seriously. Very seriously."
- "We've talked to X. We'll handle it in house."
- "X is a great teammate, really a great guy, everybody loves him. He's not that kind of person."
- "What X did is not in any way representative of our guys and who we are as a program."
- "To prove how seriously we take this kind of thing, we're gonna make X sit out the first quarter of our game against Southwest Technical College."
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bibliotheca-sanctus: Shiba Ryōtarō Memorial Museum Library in Higashiosaka, Japan
