Doug's Blog

Kristy and Katie Barry have applied for 150 jobs since graduating Rutgers University 17 months ago. It’s a familiar story for recent graduates, though I wonder how much the fact that they both have journalism degrees has added to the long wait for a job.

Good kids who went to good schools, the brassy, effervescent Barry twins, 24, always envisioned their young adulthood in New York City as a lush time of stimulating work, picturesque travel and a rich social orbit. But they graduated into a downbeat nightmare of a job market. According to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates under 27 so far this year averaged 7.1 percent, nearly double what it was in 2007 and the highest yearly average in the 30 years this data point has been tracked.

And so Kristy and Katie and most of their friends are forever hunting for jobs, both mundane interim work to sustain them and long-term positions that could mean a career. Many days, it is as if they are stalking something on the endangered species list.

William Safire died today from pancreatic cancer. He may have worked for a crook (I refer here to Richard Nixon, not The New York Times), but anyone who cares about politics and/or language will surely miss his wit and… wisdom. That cliché seems fitting for his obituary.

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

This isn’t a video and it isn’t funny. Only click if you want to read a cogent explanation of how Twitter works in theory and why it’s not banal.

Not everyone we can see will hear us, as they don’t necessarily follow us, and they may not dip into the stream in time to catch the evanescent ripples in the flow that our remark started. However, as our view is fo [sic] those we choose to follow, our emotional response is set by that, and we behave more civilly in return.

For those with Habermas’s assumption of a single common public sphere this makes no sense – surely everyone should see everything that anyone says as part of the discussion? In fact this has never made sense.

Worried about the future of The Pirate Bay? One user is and uploaded a 21.3 gigabyte torrent containing all 873,671 other torrents available on the site.

David Leonhardt writes this week in the Magazine about the economics of being overweight:

Two years ago, the Cleveland Clinic stopped hiring smokers. It was one part of a “wellness initiative” that has won the renowned hospital — which President Obama recently visited — some very nice publicity. The clinic has a farmers’ market on its main campus and has offered smoking-cessation classes for the surrounding community. Refusing to hire smokers may be more hard-nosed than the other parts of the program. But given the social marginalization of smoking, the policy is hardly shocking. All in all, the wellness initiative seems to be a feel-good story.

Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic’s chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren’t legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people.

[...]

The question of personal responsibility, then, ends up being more complicated than it may seem. It’s hard to argue that Americans have collectively become more irresponsible over the last 30 years; the murder rate has plummeted, and divorce and abortion rates have fallen. And our genes certainly haven’t changed in 30 years.

What has changed is our environment. Parents are working longer, and takeout meals have become a default dinner. Gym classes have been cut. The real price of soda has fallen 33 percent over the last three decades. The real price of fruit and vegetables has risen more than 40 percent.

The Miskito indians of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast have a history of clashes dating back to the Spanish conquest and leading through to the Contra War. More recently their coast was badly damaged by Hurricane Felix in 2007, and largely neglected by Managua in the aftermath of the storm. The Miskitos, suffering under the same exploits of other indigenous people in Latin American recently declared their independence.

The Council of Elders of the Miskito people has an extensive list of grievances. For as long local residents can remember, the federal government has allowed outside companies to exploit the raw materials in their jungle territory — everything from lobster to lumber to gold. Little benefit has come to the people who eke out a living here, they say.

Fed up, the separatists seized the region’s ruling party headquarters on April 19 and appointed Héctor Williams as their wihta tara, or great judge. Mr. Williams, a local religious leader whose thin black mustache stretches out toward his deep dimples, said the region suffered from a variety of woes — devastating hurricanes and rat plagues to a mysterious disease known as grisi siknis, which is marked by collective bouts of hysteria.

“We have the right to autonomy and self-government,” declared Wycleff Diego, the breakaway movement’s ambassador abroad, as he held up the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.