I agree, Yojimbo and Seven Samurai are my favorites. I am also a fan of Red Beard, which was much different, but still moving. I vote for any Kurosawa.

High Fidelity is a great book, I feel like I've read it every year for the past 10+ years. It's one of those books where I first enjoyed all of the music references when I was younger and now that I'm older I felt like I fully understood Rob.

First it was like, "oh that's so cool that he is really into records, and goes to shows and owns a record shop." The past few years I've realized the commentary he has about balance in life and how a partner can bring that to your life. When you lose that, it can be very hard emotionally. I feel that I have grown much more empathetic to Rob because I've been there and know what he's going through.

I like it when books are like that.

I was interested in reading this, how is it?

Thanks for putting this on. It was fun watching Star Wars last night and I'm going to try and catch this. Lelibertaire, could you add me to the tag list please? Thanks!

Agreed. Amazing.

Nice post!

Its good to be cautious before you eat something, but you can also use it as a good opportunity to learn more about your ecosystem. Find a copy of a good book like Steve Brill or Samuel Thayer. Read through it, remember what the plants look like (both written description and picture) and what habitats they are found. When you are walking through the woods, just observe. You would be amazed at how much you will start to learn and remember just by observing. You learn a lot more about your local park when you start deliberately seeing more.

I would recommend consulting with your local foraging expert before eating anything. There are many reasons why you may not want to eat a particular plant- it could be "edible" but in a highly sprayed area. There are many local botany clubs and mycology clubs that are probably in your area. Lot of great knowledge from those types of folks.

Great read!

Robert G. Kaiser has some excellent, well-informed and insightful views about the status of American media. I appreciate his history of the news media over the past fifty years and I agree that the media has shifted from a more moderate presentation of facts to a more fragmented, biased presentation of facts and I think that is a problem. But because his mentality is still stuck in the old models of news media of the twentieth century, I think he fails to see the possibilities of the future of news media. Kaiser writes of how the loss of advertising dollars substantially changed the budgets of newspapers around the country. He writes of how traditional news organizations financial well-being “depended” on advertisements because before the internet, news advertisements was an effective medium. The internet changed advertisement in a substantial way: instead of broad advertisements printed to a mass audience, internet companies now collect information on users and cater advertisement to users’ individual tastes. Essentially, companies like Facebook and Google have better advertising models than newspapers and the “classifieds” section, a place for substantial revenue for newspapers, was replaced by Craigslist. Newspapers around the US have taken a tremendous financial hit from this, most reducing their payrolls and some shutting their doors. For the newspapers that are still around, Kaiser writes, that the “…print media today are getting billions more than they probably deserve from advertisers who, governed by the inertia so common in human affairs, continue to buy space in publications that are steadily losing audience, especially among the young.” If they have not shut their doors yet, they will eventually.

Throughout the article, Kaiser bemoans the loss of news media as America once knew it: the large moderate news sources whose reporters presented the news as moderately as possible. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather have been replaced by Bill O’ Reily and John Stewart, which Kaiser points out is a poor substitute because these modern news networks cater to their audiences with commentary on the news rather than original reporting. The result is an inaccurate and unfair portrayal of news rather than actual reporting of a news story. Kaiser describes the media as fragmenting by class, region, religious inclination, generation, ethnic identity, and political ideology. The implicit implication here is that Americans no longer listen to both sides and think deeply about issues: they just listen to echo chambers of their particular viewpoints.

Kaiser is correct that the loss of advertising dollars has resulted in the discontinuation of news media as we know it, and the result has been a huge deficit in news reporting. We cannot go back to the old ways and we cannot smash the internet like luddites to try and revert back to the old ways. Instead, we need to learn from these facts that we now have about news media and the changing nature about the way in which Americans consume their news. Perhaps Americans prefer the highly polemic echo chambers of Fox News and MSNBC (not to mention the infinite number of blogs out there), but like it or not: that is how the market has changed. But just as there are Americans who prefer to listen that drivel, there are others, like myself, who like a truly fair and balanced presentation of facts to form their own opinions.

I think the internet has made is possible for many of these organizations to thrive, particularly the small ones because their overhead can be small and their audience can be large. Hosting a website is a much different distribution model than newsprint, and its cost is much less. Journalists can now work from their homes and submit news articles remotely and news organizations do not have to pay for the upkeep of news buildings. In my home state, there are a few good local news sources that are online only including “CT Mirror” which Kaiser mentions in the article. They are good quality news sources without all the advertisements, and they do moderately well because their overheads are low.

Kaiser argues that we only get quality news media when there is a profit, “And if it doesn’t pay someone a profit, it’s not likely to be produced.” This can easily be disproven by the websites that he mentions in his article such as ProPublica and Scotusblog. Yes they are funded by wealthy donors at the moment, but there are many others out there like CT Mirror who do not have patrons. There are other larger organizations out there such as NPR that have figured out a hybridization of their old funding model with something news and have still made themselves appealing to younger audiences. Their financial models are crowd-funded and they will never be as large as The Washington Post in its hey-day, but it still provides excellent news.

We are already seeing a vast change in the way news media is presented to the public. It is vastly different than newspaper, which is quite a change because it dominated news media for over one hundred years! Now we are forced to change our news reporting model. We have a more fragmented news audience, yes, but we also have the opportunity to get reporting from any part of the world as quickly as possible. I think the first-hand accounts during the Arab Spring posted on Twitter are glimpses at a future of a more decentralized, instantaneous, and varied news media to come which has the potential to give us more facts to help inform us even more than news media has been able to in the past.

Thanks, I will!

I'd vote for one of the new Tame Impala tracks, they're awesome.

Tame Impala - Eventually

Hi Hubski! I'm an educator, musician, and an amateur mycologist who is hooked to social networking sites that remind me of IRC. I'm still learning about how Hubski works, but I'm liking it a lot so far. I like deep discussions about books, music, politics, ecology and social issues. If anyone can point me in the right direction for these discussions, I'd be much obliged! Seems like I follow hashtags and users for the good discussions. Thanks!

I agree, these are excellent pieces. Very haunting, very emotional. Thanks for sharing, I hope other people who discover it will enjoy it as well.