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So. The Rocky Mountain News is done.
It seems like devastating irony that it comes the day after the Pentagon lifted the ban on photographing troops’ coffins, since it was of course the Pulitzer-winning “Final Salute” story by Jim Sheeler and Todd Heisler that first put The Rocky Mountain News on the list of newspapers dear to me. The story itself was inspiring, but we at the Evergreen also understood even then the value of a newspaper that fosters and supports that kind of difficult, time-consuming, lengthy journalism. It was something to aspire to, and for me it came at a time when I began to understand deeply how working at a newspaper could be more than a job. And who among us didn’t at one point hope maybe we’d work there someday?
It was a brighter time when Brian once said, “If the Rocky Mountain News were a woman, I’d make sweet love to it all night.”
We’ll all be okay. I keep saying so, keep looking ahead and see it will be fine. There will be other young journalists inspired by other excellent papers. But what a loss!
I’ve been saving this for a rainy day for almost a year now. I came across it writing my thesis last spring and held onto it. Josiah Royce, the main philosopher on loyalty, wrote this on the day his son was committed to a mental institution:
“We have fought our fight, and lost. We shall keep on fighting, and try not to make any outcry. .. I try to keep objective, to work up to my limit in order to meet the extra expenses (as, so far, I have done), to be of service in my job even if I can’t be successful, to hold on to my other two boys (who are so far very dear and promising), and, – incidentally, – to find or to teach a little that may be worth while in the way of truth. I don’t ask comfort. … But the poor boy will probably never see any of the light that I had been longing and fighting to have him see. And the way is a long and dark one for us all.”
The Marbury v. Madison event was held at the Newseum’s lovely conference facilities. There’s an awesome view from the balcony. It was fairly nice out today and I am very ready for spring to arrive.
Today I met Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and shook his hand. I took this photo right before that extremely exciting moment, and it’s blurry because I didn’t want to miss the moment by fiddling around with my camera to compensate for the low light. I wasn’t embarrassed about being starstruck, because plenty of full-grown lawyers were just as giddy.
Keep reading for fun facts and audio.
Last week the SPLC interns got to meet Mary Beth Tinker, at the Supreme Court no less. We took some video and got to hear firsthand what it was like to battle for students’ right to free speech.
Today marks 40 years since the court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moine Independent Community School District that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” In case you slept through your media law class, this is the case when students wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. It was the first case to affirm that students are real people with rights, and being in school doesn’t negate that.
To complement the many pots of free coffee at work, we have a a fantastic selection of journalism-related mugs. (And a dishwasher!) This is one of my favorites, because it makes Poynter look like a beautiful tropical getaway instead of the website that kills my hope on a daily basis.
The other random debris on my desk probably looks pretty familiar to those of you who’ve worked with me. An assortment of writing utensils? Check. Scattered sticky notes covered in miniscule lists? Check. Stacks of papers? Naturally.
Every year I think it would be nice to see all the Best Picture nominees, and every year I fail. (Just can’t stand sitting in the theater, as a lot of you know, not to mention paying for it.) But I figure we might get a good enough sense if everyone shared notes, so here are a few you might not know about.
I really hope “Man on Wire” wins for best documentary, because it was outstanding. I watched it after I’d visited New York, and it was the first time I felt a serious sense of loss and mourning about the World Trade Center towers. The characters are great, and the extensive footage from the time made you feel like these people could be any of your aimless, eccentric 20-something friends with too much time to sit around thinking up grand schemes.
I haven’t seen most of the Best Actor films, and I’ve heard good things about lots of them, but I’d like to put in a good word for Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor.” This WaPo article gives you a pretty good synopsis. It’s a movie worth watching.
Also, I think it’s funny that “Benjamin Button” became everyone’s favorite movie to hate, because I was not very impressed. The montage of characters at the end really sealed it for me as trying too hard to showcase “these interesting people and their stories” without ever explaining why I should care.
Today one of the “up” escalators was out at the Rosslyn metro station, where I get off for work every day, adding to an already substantial pileup of people due to a bunch of delays on the orange and blue lines. Anyone who’s not an oblivious tourist in D.C. knows that on metro escalators you stand on the right, walk on the left. I always walk.
The Rosslyn station has the longest escalator I’ve ever seen in my life, but I walk all the way up that one, too. The other day I tried just standing with the rest of the interns, but I got impatient about halfway up and couldn’t take it anymore. Usually when an escalator is out a metro station they turn off another escalator, so instead of two “up” and two “down,” you get one of each plus a neutral one.
Sorry, I just realized this post is requiring a lot of exposition for very little payoff.
So this morning I veered away from the crowd waiting for the one “up” escalator and just walked up the stopped one like an endless flight of stairs. There were 146. This is interesting, because normally when I walk up the moving escalator it is about 90 stairs. If I walk unimpeded by other people it’s usually 93 or so, and if there are people in front of me it can be anywhere from 80 to 90 depending on how slow they are. This is interesting to me because unlike a normal staircase, it varies depending on your rate. It’s also not as straightforward as a regular staircase because you get a few half-stairs where it transitions at the top and bottom, and how are you supposed to count those?
Okay, fine, this is all totally boring unless you, like me, are obsessed with counting stairs and public transportation. I will end with a very good idea we came up with yesterday to solve the problem of slow escalators. They’re all really damn slow so children and less-nimble people can get on and off safely. They have to set them to the slowest common denominator. To help those people but make the ride more efficient for the rest of us, they should have a fast escalator and a slow escalator. Brilliant!
Did I accidentally buy Chernobyl Cats? I opened a new bucket of Trader Joe’s Ginger Cats cookies the other day, and nearly all of them are deformed in some way. Usually they’re extremely uniform, with a few rare siamese cats. It doesn’t really matter, though – they all look the same in my stomach.
I thought of this idea when I was walking through the National Gallery of Art yesterday: semicolon wall. I’ve never really had art for my walls yet, but I have painted every at opportunity and I can’t help looking at modern art as potential color schemes. Typography is so clean and elegant on its own, plus it has meaning.
I’ll divulge the font after the jump so you typography nerds have a chance to speculate. It should look familiar.
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