"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
Robert Stone

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March 9, 2008

THIS WEEK'S IRIS SCAN

“There are too many images,” he said. “Too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was.”

--Photographer Robert Frank, to writer Charlie LeDuff, in the new issue of Vanity Fair (in an article on the 83-year-old Frank's visit to China to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book, The Americans).

...Jim Dwyer (co-author of 102 Minutes, the compelling best-seller about what went on inside the twin towers on September 11) writes in the Times this weekend about a subject explored in depth in Watching the World Change: the shortcomings of "biometric" data-mining and the inability of visual-surveillance technologies to isolate the facial characteristics of potential terrorists. Definitely worth your iris scan.

...Last fall, Shelby Monroe, a librarian at the Chappaqua Public Library, attended a talk I gave there for Watching the World Change. At the time, she asked my advice about potential publishing partners for a blog she was going to be posting – from Iraq, where she was volunteering as an embedded “observer,” a citizen journalist. The suburban section of the Times profiles her in this weekend’s edition.

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Shelby Moore, in Iraq

…You might want to check out this column in the Vancouver Sun on the pernicious persistence of viral Internet rumors, which includes this hokey photo sent across the Web in the days after 9/11.

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(For the background on this image, see pages 291-291 of Watching the World Change.)

…For comic relief, read this inventive satire from Yankee Potroast on overly obsessive HTML-taggers.

…Meanwhile, yours truly was on ABC’s 20/20, promoting this article from the new issue of Vanity Fair: “A Claim on Camelot,” about a man who has reason to believe he may be the secret illegitimate son of John F. Kennedy. I hope you’ll agree that the story is quite a yarn.

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ABC 20/20 "Screen Grab"

…And, while we're at it, here’s my VanityFair.com "morning-after" blog post (from last Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton posted 3 of 4 key primary victories) about how TV news programs, instead of delivering the who-what-where-when-how, now have a tendency to gin up conflicts so as to create compelling soap-opera-style narratives. (“In an era when entertainment companies control the airwaves, television news is often a series of zippy, zealous narratives, overtold and oversold, like faux ‘reality shows’ in which false hurdles are erected for the purpose of creating nightly, photogenic winners and losers, with one contestant plucked from the running, for our viewing pleasure.”)

At times I find myself pining for the days of “Just the Facts, Ma’am.”

…And since we’re on the topic, why not click over to this essay by the Washington Post’s Peter Carlson on the deadlocked Democratic convention of 1924, which went 103 – count ‘em! – ballots, before a nominee was named.

(I notice that Carlson talks about how “TV yappers…jibber-jabber.” In my blog post I describe how we “watch pundits go at each other in swashbuckling gibber-matches.” Which is it? Jibber, as in jib-jab...or gibber, as in gibberish?)

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