News you can use?

Beautiful Decay:

Lauren DiCioccio uses a simple needle and thread on cotton muslin to mummify and honor an endangered artifact– the printed newspaper. In each piece, as The New York Times’ text fades, its correlating cover portraits puncture the surface with pockets of strung together color, reminding us of a certain tactile human unraveling as we adaptively wave goodbye to the Industrial Age.

But I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city.

— “Messing with the Wrong City” by Dennis Lehane in The New York Times. We will be talking with Lehane, among others about the events unfolding in Boston on the show today.

All educations, we realized then, are not created equal. For Ryan and me, of Pahrump, Nev., just an hour from the city, the Vegas boy was a citizen of a planet we would never visit. What we didn’t know was that there were other, more distant planets that we could not even see. And those planets couldn’t see us, either.

A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.

For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything.

— 

Claire Vaye Watkins in The New York Times on the subject of college recruiting.

Watkins was on the show a couple weeks ago talking about her childhood in Nevada and writing. You can listen here.

At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant. Whether fighting in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, or at home, this deadly figure has been elevated to heroic status: willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory, selfless, noble. Yet as tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of such heroes, as tens of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in daily fear of them, a recalibration is being demanded. The need of the hour, of the year, of the generation, is peace.

— From a February 21 op-ed in The New York Times, “To Fight India, We Fought Ourselves” by today’s guest Mohsin Hamid. Hamid’s new book is called How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia.

New York Times reporter Scott Shane tells Terry Gross about the Obama administration’s justification of the President’s personal approval of the names on the kill list:

I don’t think it’s that [President Obama is] blood thirsty and really enjoys trying to put people’s names on lists to be killed. I think there’s a certain wariness — probably a proper wariness — that any president would have towards agencies. Agencies kind of want to do what they’re good at doing, or what they’re job is. So certainly, according to what we’ve heard, both the CIA and … the element of the military that does these strikes, are pretty aggressive. They want to find targets and kill them, and so I think the role of the White House …. was really one of restraining the agencies, double-checking the agencies, making sure that — at this sort of broader strategic, political level — there was good judgment being exercised…

Image by photoranger54 via Flickr

The transformation of northern Mali into a sanctuary for terrorists and the subjection of its people to medieval cruelties are a threat to the entire West African region. But even with the Security Council vote, it seems unrealistic to expect an effective solution anytime soon.

— 

“No Easy Answers In Mali,” The New York Times Opinion Pages, December 30, 2012

Coming up today on the show, Adam Nossiter, West Africa bureau chief for the Times, talks about the current crisis in Mali.

On today’s show: the science of exercise with tips for both experienced marathoners and couch to 5k’ers.

Spray and Pray (by Fadzly @ Shutterhack)

The Obama administration has taken the position that if regime change is really Israel’s goal in Iran, then the bombing of the [nuclear] facilities would probably be the single most counterproductive step that they could take.

— On today’s Fresh Air, David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, talks about the ongoing nuclear standoff and details what could potentially happen if Israel decided to mount a military strike against uranium enrichment sites in Iran.

The minivan’s interior, the band members told Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” smelled of urine.

— Best mention in the New York Times ever….which was quoting this interview with The Black Keys.

(Source: http)

We need your help for Monday’s interview. Etiquette questions?

On Monday, we’re interviewing Philip Galanes. He’s the person who writes the New York Times advice column Social Q’s where he “offers lighthearted advice about awkward social situations.”

For example, he’s answered questions like:

• What to do when you have a mistress and a son and you accidentally text your son instead of your mistress?
• My husband’s grandmother takes really offensive photographs of my double chin and then sends them to our entire family, what do I do?
• What should I do when strangers in coffee shops ask me to watch their stuff and I don’t want to?

We want to pose some modern day social etiquette from our listening audience to Philip on Monday. So if you have a burning question about your relatives, the holidays, technology, email gaffes and/or dating, please ask away!

On today’s Fresh Air, media reporter David Carr reflects on old media, new media, and the future of journalism: “The web is kind of a self-cleaning oven and what you have up there can grow more accurate as time goes by. That’s never true of print. It’s always there for the ages.”

_DSF3379 (by lekoil)

jacobsoboroff:

Happy Sunday. Let the bicoastal newspaper reading begin. (Taken with instagram)

Tomorrow: New York Times reporter David Carr on old media, new media, social media and the future of newspapers 

Monday: Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times speaks about his series on radiation medicine and instances of over-radiation. 

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR x-ray via my dad’s x-ray collection (by Melody Kramer)

On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, New York Times labor and workplace reporter Steve Greenhouse explains why other states with large budget deficits are also considering taking on public unions — and how the standoff between organized labor and Republican governors is likely to play out.

Obviously, there was no way we were going to prevent people from going to the Wikileaks website to see the documents, but as a matter of principle, we said that when we published our stories about the Afghanistan documents, we were not going to link to their website,” says Keller. “We feared that it could become hit list material for the Taliban. [Assange] was deeply offended, not just that we had not linked to his website, but that we had made a point of not linking to his website. He thought we had shown disrespect.

— New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in a conversation on Fresh Air, talking about when things went south, with Julian Assange.