Category: Recommended

The media has tremendous power to shape public opinion. Reporters and editors should not just be aware of their ability to spread moral panics. They should be terrified of it.

When you buy into the myth of the singular genius, it becomes unseemly that a brilliant writer might need an equal partner in an audio producer to coherently package and adapt their thoughts for a new medium.

That’s the gag, Dave. I thought when you got free, if you decided to come back to us, you’d find a way to help us feel more free too. I believe that’s what laughter does. It loosens us up, helps us shake ourselves free. But watching you spew bullshit just as hurtful as the words those men hurled at us last weekend, I didn’t feel like I was being set free. I felt like I’d just been stabbed by someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I stop bleeding.

5/15/48: Please try to notice if every artist isn’t ruthless in some way. Even the sweetest of characters have done something, generally because of their creative life, that to the rest of the world is inhuman. Some cases are more obvious, others may be more concealed. I know mine exists, my cruelty. Though where I cannot precisely say, for I try always to purge myself of evil.

This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down.

The filmmakers had turned over the raw production audio, and the full transcript revealed that the smoking-gun quote did not really exist. The filmmakers had re-ordered his words and removed other sentences in between, splicing together what had potentially been two disparate thoughts. Amid twenty rambling sentences on a hot mic, Durst may have made some kind of confession, but it was certainly not nearly as clear as the show had made it seem. Critics viewed this as a grave transgression, and journalists saw an engineered quote meant to gin up drama and deceive viewers. (The New York Times headline read, “As Durst Murder Case Goes Forward, HBO’s Film Will Also Be on Trial.”) For filmmakers, radical audio edits like this one are routine, even though the ramifications for their subjects tend to be less severe. It was a clear breach of journalistic ethics, but none of the men behind the film were journalists. The two camps were not really speaking the same language.

A number of people responded to the post, including this guy: “OK, I am a little confused. A planet ‘behind’ the sun? One that people who lived 6,000 years ago knew about even though they hadn’t yet figured out that the earth was round? I think it’s time to get some Science up in this bitch!” He then listed a number of reasons the hidden planet was bullshit. Later, Jeff told me about an American musician named Bill Callahan who once released an album called “Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle.” God, I wish I’d thought of that.

Alison started shouting out assignments. Matt Gallo should head to the hospital; Susan Fisher and Mike Sweet should drive downtown for man-on-the-street interviews; Steve Delaney, Tony Miller, and the photographers should go straight to the scene. Within the hour, firefighters evacuated the newsroom (train cars containing anhydrous ammonia were parked perilously close) and everyone regrouped at a nearby dive bar. Reporters made calls from the payphone and scrawled their stories on reams of paper someone had nabbed from an old typewriter shop. Photographers developed their film in a bathtub at someone’s house on the northwest side of town.

Anton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation. Every other infliction can eventually be withstood or overcome, but not humiliation. Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.

A vessel without power is known as a dead ship. The Safer died in 2017, when its steam boilers ran out of fuel. A boiler is a tanker’s heart, because it generates the power and the steam needed to run vital systems. Two diesel generators on deck now provide electricity for basic needs, such as laptop charging. But crucial processes driven by the boiler system have ceased—most notably, “inerting,” in which inert gases are pumped into the tanks where the crude is stored, to neutralize flammable hydrocarbons that rise off the oil. Before inerting became a commonplace safety measure, in the nineteen-seventies, tankers blew up surprisingly often, and with lethal consequences: in December, 1969, three of them exploded within seventeen days, killing four men. Since the boilers on the Safer stopped working, the ship has been a tinderbox, vulnerable to a static-electric spark, a discharged weapon, a tossed cigarette butt.