Short guide to lazy EU journalism The unofficial rulebook for lazy EU journalism. 20 invaluable tips for your career in EU journalism. 1. Not sure how the EU works or what institutions are involved? –> Just write “Brussels”. 2. How to Find Stock Photos That Don't Suck - DesignRope Gone are the days when using stock photography meant cheesy smiles of people in suits or sub-par clip art style photos. There’s been a growing trend of sites offering high quality stock images, often for free or at low cost. You’ll have no doubt come across many of the images from these sites in blog posts, startup hero images and elsewhere. Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Detained By British Security; Was Transporting Top Secret Documents Early Sunday morning, Glenn Greenwald learned that his Brazilian partner, David Miranda, was detained and interrogated for nine hours by security officials at London’s Heathrow airport. The officials also seized Miranda’s electronic devices: his phone, laptop and so forth. At first glance, if he was indeed held because of his association with Greenwald, this was a horribly tone-deaf and heavy-handed move by British officials, especially knowing that Miranda was apparently detained under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act of 2000, Schedule 7. My initial reaction was the same as many: Why did the British government target Greenwald’s spouse? He might’ve been profiled, I thought, or he might’ve been flagged as Greenwald’s spouse. If the latter was the case, it didn’t look good.
Firefox and Flux: A New, Beautiful Browser is Coming Tomorrow, on April 29, something amazing is coming to Firefox. It’s not an interface adjustment or tweak. It’s not a bug fix. Granta 92: The View from Africa This article was originally published in Granta 92. Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. The Road to Hell Is Paved with Viral Videos - By David Rieff Click here to see photos of the evolution of the LRA. When and how so many Americans, young people in particular, were convinced, or convinced themselves, that awareness offers the key to righting wrongs wherever in the world they may be is hard to pinpoint. But whatever else it does and fails to do, Kony 2012, the 30-minute video produced by a previously obscure California- and Uganda-based charity called Invisible Children that seeks to "make Joseph Kony famous in 2012" so that this homicidal bandit leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in central Africa will be hunted down and turned over to the International Criminal Court, illustrates just how deeply engrained in American culture this assumption has now become. As a film, as history, and as policy analysis, there is little to be said for Kony 2012 except that its star and narrator, Jason Russell, the head of Invisible Children, and his colleagues seem to have their hearts in the right place. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Guest post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things) Click here to see photos of the evolution of the LRA. Thanks to an incredibly effective social media effort, #StopKony is trending on Twitter today. The campaign coincides with a new awareness-raising documentary by the group Invisible Children. Former FP intern Michael Wilkerson, now a freelance journalist and grad student at Oxford -- who has lived and reported from Uganda -- contributed this guest post on the campaign. -JK
Grand Budapest Hotel poster and typeface: Futura is out, and Wes Anderson’s new font is Archer. The new poster for Wes Anderson’s much-anticipated follow-up to Moonrise Kingdom hit the Web today, and it’s predictably dollhouse-y and gorgeous, resembling the old-fashioned one-sheet for Moonrise Kingdom. But one thing above all will stand out to longtime Wes fans: the typeface. Anderson has used Futura for most of his features since 1996’s Bottle Rocket, with the typeface even earning a coveted spot on the Wes Anderson bingo board. But recently he has mixed up his font game a bit, opting instead for a custom typeface, designed by Jessica Hische, for Moonrise Kingdom. What did he go with for his next picture, The Grand Budapest Hotel? Archer.
The Return of Wood: New Designs for An Age-Old Material Photo courtesy Orée It feels a little ridiculous calling something as classic as wood a trend. But recently it’s become impossible not to notice that wood has had a design resurgence. Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them Platon If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied. In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed.
Valérie Trierweiler’s book is captivating France – for all the wrong reasons There is a saying in France: l’information s’arrête à la porte de la chambre à coucher – information stops at the bedroom door. It was, until the advent of paparazzi and social media, THE golden rule of privacy for French journalists; a self-censorship that enabled former president François Mitterrand to maintain a second family – largely at taxpayers’ expense – with the knowledge of the press but not the voting, paying public. Valérie Trierweiler’s score-settling book about her life with François Hollande, published this week, does not stop at the presidential bedroom door. It does not even knock politely, but kicks it off its hinges, trampling taboos, totems, rules and privacy in its muckraking wake. Merci pour ce Moment (Thanks for the Moment) has no racy sex scenes, unless readers find the image of a besuited Hollande kneeling on a bed with his head in his hands a turn-on, but is still a torrid read, described by one French commentator as “sentimental pornography”.
What does (European) schooling do to religious belief and practice? A new paper from Pogorelova and Mocan: We exploit information on compulsory schooling reforms in 11 European countries, implemented in the 1960s and 70s, to identify the impact of education on religious adherence and religious practices. Using micro data from the European Social Survey, conducted in various years between 2002 and 2013, we find consistently large negative effects of schooling on self-reported religiosity, social religious acts (attending religious services), as well as solitary religious acts (the frequency of praying). We also use data from European Values Survey to apply the same empirical design to analyze the impact of schooling on superstitious beliefs.
Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries. People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are. Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data. Bobby Duffy, managing director of the Ipsos Mori social research institute, said:
The numbers that keep our world afloat Here is a quick quiz of three questions that you will get wrong. Don’t worry, everyone gets them wrong. But try to be the least amount of wrong possible, and write down your gut estimations: • How long is a million seconds, and how much longer is a billion seconds? • How much per person did the UK banks’ bailouts cost? • If 100 people in Britain were picked at random, how many of them will be immigrants?