Military blogger Chief Wiggles is collecting s to distribute to Iraqi children. (Via InstaPundit.) The address is:
Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335
No guns (including water pistols), no violent action figures or other violent s, no Barbies or otherwise un-Islamically clad dolls. (Specific list on his site.) The easiest way to buy and ship may be through s R Us on Amazon. One reader suggested that Chief Wiggles set up a wish list with a link bloggers can use, but so far that hasn't happened. If it does, I'll post it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 23, 2003 • Comments
USA Today media critic Peter Johnson looks at the question of systematic bad-news bias in reporting from Iraq.
Is the cup half full or half empty in Iraq?
Just as opinions about the war and its aftermath vary widely, reporters in Baghdad disagree about what it's like in Iraq these days.
Although some paint a picture of recovery, with U.S. armed forces making progress in getting the country going again, others sketch a bleaker scene, in which bombings, ambushes and looting are the rule, not the exception.
Reporters agree on this much: Bad news -- not good -- sells."It's the nature of the business," Time's Brian Bennett says. "What gets in the headlines is the American soldier getting shot, not the American soldiers rebuilding a school or digging a well."
Read the whole article.
The bottom line: There's good news and bad news, not a single coherent narrative, and different reporters perceive the story differently--not because they're necessarily biased for or against U.S. efforts but because they have different experiences and weight different information differently. All of which explains why I don't, from my perch in the United States, opine on the "real" situation in Iraq. Like the "real" situation in the United States, it's complicated and contains many contradictions. Reporters on the scene owe their audiences the messy details, even when they won't fit into a neat narrative predicting either certain victory or an inevitable quagmire.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 23, 2003 • Comments
Why are the trash cans in hotel rooms so small? You have more trash in a hotel room--newspapers, paper papers, food debris, Diet Coke bottles--than in your bedroom or bathroom at home. But the trash cans are even tinier than the ones I have at home, and they're always overflowing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 23, 2003 • Comments
USA Today reports that pay raises will be "bleak" this year:
Employee pay raises are projected at about 3.6%, according to a September survey of 1,276 companies by human resource consultants Hewitt Associates. Salary increases in 2003 averaged 3.4% and were the smallest in 27 years.
"We would describe the picture as pretty bleak," says Ken Abosch, business leader at Hewitt. "Organizations are doing everything in their power to keep a firm grip on pay expenses."
Similarly, in a poll of more than 1,700 companies, Mercer Human Resource Consulting found average pay hikes in 2004 would be about 3.5%. That marks the third consecutive year that annual pay increases have fallen below 4%.
"The smallest in 27 years." How stupid are these people? Have they never heard of inflation, or the recent lack of same. In an environment where inflation is essentially nonexistent, a 3.5 percent raise is great. But the consultants are somehow nostalgic for the good old days when you'd get a 9 percent raise just to keep up with inflation. (I got a huge real raise out of that one, since a 9 percent cost of living increase was written into a WSJ union contract that didn't count on the Volcker Fed.) I tend to think the CPI is somewhat overstated, because of unmeasured quality improvements, but even taking the figures at face value, any intelligent assessment of raises has to assume that they'll be smaller when inflation is running below 2 percent than when it's running at, say, 5 percent--or, if you go back a generation, much higher.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 23, 2003 • Comments
The NYC hotel HarperCollins is putting me up in has free Wi-Fi in the rooms, which means I'm much more likely to keep up the blogging over the next few days--and also more likely to come back to this hotel in the future.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 22, 2003 • Comments
The U.S. has quietly pulled the last combat troops out of Saudi Arabia. Here's the NYT report. Money quote:
As one American diplomatic official based in the region put it, "on both sides, actually, the alliance had become a little bit of poison, and both sides were glad to see it end."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 22, 2003 • Comments
Andrew Sullivan writes:
California brings gay couples closer to equality with straight ones. But why the state income tax exception? More evidence, to my mind, that civil unions are no alternative to marriage and actually perpetuate cultural balkanization and civic inequality.
Alternatively, the state income tax exception--gay couples won't be allowed to file joint returns--demonstrates political clout. In a high-income, high-tax state like California, the marriage tax is significant. And, as I've noted before, research on the subject suggests that legalizing gay marriage would raise federal income tax revenue--by hitting those couples with extra taxes.
There are actually a host of questions raised by California's status as a community property state. From the news reports, it doesn't sound like the "split everything equally" rule necessarily applies to domestic partners.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 22, 2003 • Comments
Here's an interesting Slate article on " How four magazines you've probably never read help determine what books you buy" (via Milt Rosenberg). I'm happy to say that TSOS got a good Publisher's Weekly review, a sharp contrast to TFAIE, which was not reviewed in PW.
Tom Carson's long Atlantic review of The Substance of Style is now online. If you want to know what my book is aboutm (not just toilet brushes), or just have a fun read, take a look.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 21, 2003 • Comments
Thanks to Kevin Aylward of Wizbang, this blog now has an RSS feed. See the "syndicate this site" link to the left, above the blogroll. I've also made a few additions to the blogroll, with more to come.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 21, 2003 • Comments
This report from The Independent is disturbing:
Loyalist Labour MPs and ministers who backed the war in Iraq face a backlash from Muslim voters, say community leaders.
Ihtisham Hibatullah, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said Labour's defeat in Brent on Thursday was a "clear warning" to other Labour MPs to change policy on Iraq and on their support for President George Bush.
Muslim activists are targeting a number of prominent MPs who hold seats with large numbers of Muslim voters, particularly the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in Blackburn and the east London MPs Oona King, Jim Fitzpatrick and Stephen Timms.
The report is also incomplete. It never explains why Muslims object to the Blair policy in Iraq--presumably they're not just peaceniks--or asks why Britain should not support the war on terror. Do they sympathize with Saddam? Do they fear U.S. power? Do they support al Qaeda or, if not its methods, its goals? Are there important differences among British Muslims? On a story this potentially significant, reporters should ask the basic questions--and share the answers with their readers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 20, 2003 • Comments