The Importance of Active vs. Passive Voice in Protest Coverage
I wanted to use the two tweets from NYT to explain active versus passive voice and why it matters in news coverage (particularly when covering charged topics at the moment). A sentence typically has a clear subject and verb. When you write a sentence, you can write in active or passive voice. Active voice is subject then verb. An example is “I fixed the car.”
It’s time to tune in: why listening is the real key to communication
When people find out I’m a journalist, they typically tell me they used to write for their school newspaper or that their child wants to be a journalist, or that their cousin is a blogger. Or they might say they loved a film about a newsroom, but can’t remember the name. They might try to look up the film on their phones and, while they are at it, will show me a cat video trending on Twitter. It’s rare that people don’t interrupt and shift conversation to themselves.
I Don’t Care About Net Neutrality Because I’m Fine Letting Greedy Telecom Companies Decide How I…
Originally published by Whitney Meers on November 29th 2017 And also, I don’t care about our country’s future. *** This is satire.
It's Not 1968, and Trump Isn't Nixon - The Dispatch
Historical analogies are sometimes interesting and occasionally illuminating, but often they’re a substitute for thinking seriously about what’s going on in front of you. For instance, around the time President Trump started tweeting “LAW & ORDER!” at seemingly random intervals, a slew of political observers concluded that the Trump White House was going to replay Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 bid for the presidency.
Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe
That’s a level that suits Trump because it’s the level at which he excels. Anyone who studies Trump’s tweets carefully must come away impressed by the way he has mastered the demagogic arts. He doesn’t lead his base, as most politicians do. He personifies it. He speaks to his followers as if he were them. He cultivates their resentments, demonizes their opponents, validates their hatreds.
Shifting ingroups from TV2 Denmark
Ingroups can be pretty powerful. We tend to like people in our ingroups more than people in our outgroups (ingroup bias), and we tend to see people in our outgroups as being more like each other than people in our ingroups (outgroup homogeneity bias), for example. There is much rhetoric about Democrats vs. Republicans, immigrants/refugees vs. native born, the wealthy vs. the middle class vs. the working poor, people with homes vs. people who are homeless. Depending on where you live, the groups may be different than these, but the groups are there.
Unsafe at Any Rate
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street–and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner. Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time.
Candace Owens: ‘I Do Not Support George Floyd And The Media Depiction Of Him As A Martyr For Black America’
In an explosive 18-minute video posted on YouTube Thursday, conservative commentator Candace Owens explains why she does “not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America.” During her at-times impassioned video post (below), Owens, who is African-American, criticizes what she describes as the African-American community “cater[ing] to the bottom denominator of our society” by “demand[ing] support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.” The holding up of Floyd as a “martyr for black America,” she suggests, is an example of this trend that she forcefully rejects.
Can we think without language?
“I don’t think very young children do think.” If this sounds controversial, it is—psychologist Charles Fernyhough says as much in a Radiolab interview. Fernyhough defines thinking as processing experience through language. That is, for him, thought is largely verbal: what most of us think of as “thinking” involves narrating the world to ourselves as we go through it. He drew the conclusion that little kids don’t think after an experiment showed that children as old as 5 often cannot put together the two verbally-expressed ideas “left” and “blue wall” to grasp the phrase “left of the blue wall”, even when they know what “left” means. Which, to be fair, is a bit shocking.
