Posts filed under “General Knowledge”
DAILY CONCLAVE ANNOUNCEMENTS.
Cardinals are reminded that cell phones are not permitted within the conclave bounds and must be left with the Pontifical Curator of Electronics. A copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia is available in the break room to settle arguments about historical trivia. The Angry Birds station we set up for the 2013 conclave is still available next to the coffee maker, and we have been informed that there are no lines this time around.
The kitchen staff have asked us to inform cardinals that the chicken à la King served for today’s lunch was the best that could possibly be made under the circumstances. If you did not like it, you are welcome to come into the kitchen and make your own chicken à la King.
Today’s papal ballot is sponsored by the Mackey Print Paper Company, manufacturers of fine papers for more than a century and a half. When you need paper that combusts evenly with a thick, visible smoke, you need Mackey Print Paper. Ask about our scented collection.
In football news, or “soccer” for our American brethren, the Byzantine Bulls tied with the Maronite Marvels today, with four cardinals suffering minor shin injuries on each side.
WHAT’S THE MOST UNETHICAL THING IN JOURNALISM TODAY? THE ANSWER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU.
Governor Vetoes Measure to Raise Salaries of Judges
Here is a headline from a news site yesterday:
This common phrase is widely misused. Is it worth salvaging?
Can you spot the difference in technique?
The first headline is designed to give you all the information you might need, in as few words as possible, to decide whether you want to read the article.
The second headline is designed to obscure the information you would need to decide whether you want to read the article. You must click on the headline to be taken to the article before you know whether it lives up to your expectations.
The first puts the reader in charge. The second is pure manipulation. It is designed to make you do something you might not do if you had enough information to make an informed decision.
We did not pick an especially egregious example of clickbait. We picked an example nearly at random, but one that demonstrates the technique.
The economics of Internet advertising have brought us to this point.
In a printed newspaper, if you are seeing the headline, you are seeing the page with the article and any advertisements the newspaper has sold on that page. If it is the front page, and you are reading one of those newspapers with no ads on the front page, then the articles will probably continue on an inner page. But by that time, the headline itself and the top-down structure of traditional newspaper articles guarantee that you know you want to read that article. Ad revenue depends mostly on one figure, which is the circulation of the newspaper. How well people like the paper as a whole determines how valuable the advertising space inside it is.
In an online news site, ad revenue depends on individual clicks. The more times you make a reader go to a separate page, the more ad space you have to sell, and the more likely the reader is to click by accident on one of the ads and earn you a penny. Some readers may perhaps even deliberately click on an advertisement—but even those readers have more advertisements to click on if you make them go to a separate page.
With profit, and indeed mere survival, at stake, news sites need you to click on that headline. They begin to learn what makes you more likely to click. They take note of which headlines were most effective at bringing in the clicks and try to distill the essence of clickability from them. Detailed statistics show them what works and what leaves readers cold and clickless. Slowly the editors learn how to manipulate readers into doing what the editors want the readers to do. Slowly, by imperceptible stages, their profession changes from journalist to con artist.
Eventually the contrast with the old way is stark. A printed newspaper offers its readers something to read: they can choose how they want to inform themselves, to entertain themselves, to exercise their minds in their own way. A news site manipulates its readers, and must manipulate its readers to survive.
That necessity has grave implications for the whole business of journalism. The most effective way to manipulate readers is with strong emotions; and long experience has proved to the clickbait artists that, once the cute-animal stories of the day are exhausted, the most effective emotion at producing the clicks is anger. Bit by bit, the editors of news sites learn how to make their readers angrier. With click revenues constantly in front of them as a scorecard, they learn how to make us hate each other. They herd us into hostile packs of extremists. They become angry extremists themselves, and their readers applaud them, because the general-interest newspaper that appeals to all sides has been killed by clickbait. Eventually the headlines reach a peak of clickbait perfection: “These Jews Held a Secret Meeting. What They Decided Will Turn Your Stomach.” We didn’t start out to become Nazis: we were forced into it by economics.
What can we do? The dollar is God; it decrees whether news sites live or die. But we, as individuals, control the pennies that make up those dollars. “If we could change ourselves,” as Gandhi said (in a phrase that is usually mutilated into bumper-sticker quotability), “the tendencies in the world would also change.”
The way to change ourselves is wonderfully simple. When we see clickbait, we don’t click on it. The next time you see a headline so intriguing that you can’t possibly resist clicking on it, resist it. Remember that it was crafted specifically to make you do something you would not otherwise do. It is as important to resist this as it is to resist the telephone con man who tells you there’s a warrant out for your arrest or that someone has ordered an iPhone on your Amazon account. Then, once you have passed it by, the sun will shine and the birds will sing, and you will realize that the world is more beautiful without whatever article it was that you didn’t read.
By the way, what was the common phrase that is widely misused? Dr. Boli has no idea. He didn’t take the bait.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
YOUTH AND AGE AND THE AMERICAN WAY.
Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
—Sam Ullman, American poet and humanitarian.
Dr. Boli is being honest with you when he says that he had not expected the quotation to go that way. After reading the first sentence, he had expected something like this: “Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by learning from our experiences, by loving wisdom and nevertheless understanding that we are not yet wise, by sorting through our youthful enthusiasms and honestly discarding the follies among them. Without that labor, we can never be truly old; we can only be wrinkled children.”
But it seems that Dr. Boli, in spite of living in this country since before the Constitution, is not American enough to understand age the American way. He still thinks of age and experience as valuable things to be treasured, whereas the American ideal has it that life ends at twenty-nine. Aging is a catastrophe to be avoided; in fact, the only thing we avoid more zealously than aging is the only alternative to aging.
Well, Dr. Boli feels foolish now. But, to be fair to himself, he will point out that the attribution to an American poet and humanitarian comes after the quotation. The word “American” might have made him think differently. “The youth of America is their oldest tradition,” as one of Oscar Wilde’s characters observed a century and a quarter ago. “It has been going on now for three hundred years.”
And indeed the sentiment of Samuel Ullman is not a new one. It is amusing to reflect that Mr. Ullman was fourteen years older than Oscar Wilde. It is even more amusing to reflect that he was probably not the author of this quotation.
Of course it is all over the Internet attributed to Ullman, but never with a citation, which is an observation that always leads us to suspect a misattributed quotation. “Youth,” from which it is taken, is usually described as a “poem,” which indicates that the people who quote it are so lamentably ignorant of literary history that they believe a man who died in 1924 could have written a prose essay and called it a “poem.”
Yet here is “Youth” quoted at the site of the Samuel Ullman Museum in Alabama. What more authority could you want? Except, perhaps, for a citation with date, which is nowhere to be found.
However, if we go back in time a bit, we find that the little essay—not described as a “poem”—was constantly reprinted in magazines in the early twentieth century. In a 1927 issue of the Michigan Education Journal we find it attributed to that venerable essayist “Anon.” In an elaborately illustrated page from Cosmopolitan in 1914 we find it attributed to Dr. Frank Crane, and that seems to be the earliest and most popular attribution.
In the February 12, 1927, edition of The Foreword, a Masonic journal, we find the essay, and then this explanation of its source:
Fred Harvey gave the preceding meditation on Youth to The Kansas City Star with the comment that it came in a letter from Sam Moore, formerly of Kansas City, now of New York. The Star asked Mr. Moore if he were its author. Mr. Moore said he wished he were, but he got it from George Reichel, Vice-president of the First National Bank. Mr. Reichel, appealed to, said he had it in a letter from E. C. Stuart, Vice-president of the First National Bank of St. Louis. Mr. Stuart replied:
“You overwhelm me with embarrassment. If I could justly lay claim to the authorship I would be quite willing to make the admission in big type on billboards. The article was cut from some newspaper and if the author’s name was appended, I didn’t notice it.”
As for the attribution to Ullman, that seems to have been made first in a book called The Silver Treasury: Prose and Verse for Every Mood, edited by Jane Manner and published by Samuel French in 1934.
Now, having corrected the Internet (which will nevertheless persist in its incorrectness, because the Internet pays no attention to us at all), we may still ask ourselves why Frank Crane or Anon or anybody else thought so much of youth and so little of age.
It seems to Dr. Boli that the peculiarities of American capitalism may explain much of the sentiment. In the nineteenth century, education slowly expanded until it became universal. Even poor children were given a liberal education: they learned history, they read Shakespeare, they practiced Beethoven on the piano. If they went on to college, the liberal arts were forced on them even if they went to a technical school like Carnegie Tech or MIT.
In other words, they spent their youth in the realm of ideals. They lived with the most glorious productions of human thought.
Then they left school, and they became factory workers and assistant clerks and bank tellers and accountants. They spent the rest of their lives in drudgery for usually unseen masters.
Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand how growing old would seem a curse, and youth would be the golden time of life. The only reasonably happy individual would be the one who could carry enough of those golden days of youth into the drudgery of middle age to have something of a mental life.
The good news is that good old American capitalism, our other most hallowed institution, may at last succeed in scraping the shine off youth in our imaginations. As capitalism muscles its way into the academic world, as universities and public schools are taken over by Masters of Business Administration, as the curriculum down to the kindergarten level is methodically adjusted to produce adequate servants for the masters of capital, new generations of Americans are rising who have no happy memories of a time when their lives were devoted to learning and the contemplation of beauty. They will see youth not as a golden age, but as the early stages of lifelong drudgery. Their only hope will be the possibility of a better future, and they may even, if they are ambitious, take steps to make that future a reality. Then, perhaps, we shall see a generation that knows how to grow old and relishes the process.
FUN FACTS ABOUT THE COMMENT SYSTEM.
It is no surprise to readers who come here regularly that everything about Dr. Boli is a bit archaic. He tries to keep up with the latest trends, but T-shirts with printed slogans still strike him as a dangerous or depressing novelty, and he has not yet come to terms with the loss of the distinction between “may” and “might,” which confuses him but gives those young folks who say “very meta” no trouble.
This Magazine itself, even in its electrical form, is a relic of a bygone age. When the Magazine moved to the World-Wide Web, the WordPress software that runs the Magazine was four years old. The iPhone was six months old. “Blogs” were the new big thing.
The last time Dr. Boli did any serious design work on the site was when he moved to his own domain at drboli.com. At that time he decided the whole site needed a fresh look, so he turned for inspiration to the type and layout of general-interest magazines of the middle nineteenth century. That was fresh, in the sense that no other site had anything like it.
Because no other site had anything like it, Dr. Boli had to do the design himself. That required writing some code, and Dr. Boli is not suited for writing code. He did it, because no one else would do it. But he did not enjoy it very much.
That was in 2013, which a glance at the calendar tells us was twelve years ago. Since then, the design of the site—technically known as a “theme,” for connoisseurs of WordPress software—has been growing barnacles while the currents flowed around it. It will probably have to be replaced at some point, when the latest software updates finally bury it at the crossroads with a stake through its heart. But for now it still works, if we are willing to put up with some of its archaisms and patch it with pitch and duct tape every once in a while.
Most of the burden of those archaisms falls on the editor of the Magazine, who is willing to carry it. However, the comment system is primitive, and is likely to remain primitive. When Dr. Boli tried the experiment of installing a simple Markdown parser for comments, it broke the site so completely that nothing would appear but a blank white screen. Many readers would tell us that was an improvement, but it is not the intended look and feel of the site. The intended look has words, and the intended feel is something like the texture of fine linen stationery. Thus we are limited to plain text for most commenters.
However, there is a loophole for the pedantic and the stubborn. The comments will parse basic HTML markup. If you are familiar with some of the rudiments of the language, you can use HTML to add italics, bold, block quotes, and other typographic refinements to your opinions. Here is a very short list of formatting codes you can use.
Italics.
You can use italics for <em>emphasis</em> or to set off the title of a book, like <i>Pendennis</i> by Thackeray. That will appear thus:
You can use italics for emphasis or to set off the title of a book, like Pendennis by Thackeray.
Note the two different codes for italics. They lead to the same result, but they are semantically different, and if you are pedantic enough to care about that, you probably do not need this list of HTML formatting codes.
Bold.
You can use bold text for <strong>strong emphasis</strong> or <b>other things that need bolding</b>.You can use bold text for strong emphasis or other things that need bolding.
Once again, there are two semantically different ways to get bold text. They mean different things to anyone who reads your comment by choosing the “View Page Source” option in the browser. You have no one but yourself to blame if you are mocked for using the wrong one.
Links.
You can use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink">hyperlinks</a> to link to useful information.You can use hyperlinks to link to useful information.
Links sometimes cause our whimsical spam-suppression system to toss a comment in the trash, but Dr. Boli always finds the comments that end up there within a day or two.
Blockquotes.
You can use blockquotes for extended quotations from another writer. (To use them for extended quotations from yourself suggests an enlarged self-esteem that may need to be lanced.)
<blockquote>
From what torments might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be saved by remembering that Our Lord “spake not without a parable”! —<i>Coventry Patmore.</i>
</blockquote>You can use blockquotes for extended quotations from another writer. (To use them for extended quotations from yourself suggests an enlarged self-esteem that may need to be lanced.)
From what torments might the poor simpleton of a modern pietist be saved by remembering that Our Lord “spake not without a parable”! —Coventry Patmore.
Small Capitals.
As a special benefit for readers of this Magazine, you can even insert <sc>small capitals</sc> in your comments. Can any other magazine on line offer you that privilege?As a special benefit for readers of this Magazine, you can even insert
This list is not exhaustive. Ordered and unordered lists will probably also work, and if you delight in coding such lists by hand, go ahead and give it a try. You can even add a horizontal rule.
Or you can just write in plain text, and use a carefully crafted arrangement of well-chosen vocabulary to make your point. That might also work.
From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.
Easter Bunny.—The Easter Bunny’s given name is actually Bernard, but he has never succeeded in getting most Americans to take him seriously enough to use the formal version of his name.
THE BUTLERS WE NEVER HIRED.
You walk back in and ask the butler, “Did someone steal my car?”
“No,” says the butler. “Sir had not driven that particular automobile for several days, so one took the liberty of moving it farther down the street and placing the gardening tools, which sir has been using more frequently of late, closer to the house.”
“Well, that’s fine,” you say, “but it would be more convenient to have the car where I expected it to be. Nevertheless, since I came back in the house anyway, I think I’ll have some tea.” You reach for the Keemun, but pull down Lung Ching instead. Turning to the butler again, you ask the sensible and obvious question.
“Lung Ching was the tea sir drank most recently,” he explains, “so of course one moved it to the front, where it would be easily accessible.”
“Yes,” you try to explain, “but when I reach for a thing, I expect it to be where I expect it, and not in a different place each time. If it’s in a different place each time, I have to go looking for it each time. It costs mental effort. It makes my life harder, not easier.”
But the butler doesn’t see it that way. Every time you reach for something, it’s in a different place. You reach for the toothbrush, and find the soap. You reach for the garden shears, and find the hoe. You reach for your wife, and find your brother-in-law. Everything is constantly moving around, because the butler is always noting what you have used most frequently or most recently and moving that thing to a position he thinks is more accessible.
How long will that butler remain in your employ? Probably no longer than it takes you to write a glowing reference for him to take to the next sucker who hires him.
But your phone and your computer will keep doing exactly the same thing, and you will not fire them. That’s just how they work, you will say. It’s true that you have to go looking every single time for the app you want to launch or the site you want to visit, because things keep shifting around all over the place, but that’s because Google and Microsoft and the rest are determined to make life easier for their users, no matter how much extra work it creates for us.
The ultimate plan, of course, is to make us completely dependent on the choices our minders make for us. Instead of picking the entertainment or information we want, we will pick what the pushers of information want us to look at, because it is less work to do so. If all goes as planned, our entire intellectual life will depend on external direction.
Is this a wicked conspiracy? No; it is worse. It is an unexamined assumption. The people who cause our software and Web sites to take this proactive approach genuinely believe they are making our lives better, and they are so certain that they dismiss the complaints of users as noise from random cranks. They really do believe that we wish not to be burdened with independent thought, so they are not likely to change their ways.
But, speaking as one random crank to a small but select group of random cranks, Dr. Boli would suggest putting a little extra effort into your intellectual life. Do what it takes—install utilities or browser extensions or alternative applications or even whole alternative operating systems—to make sure that you are in control of what you do and what you see on your phone or computer, not Microsoft or Apple or Google. It will be a little extra work, but you will be a happier person. And if enough of us do that, the profit-minded capitalists will take note.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
Constant Reader in Connoquenessing. The socks are worn under the shoes because the shoes do a better job of protecting the socks than the socks would do of protecting the shoes.
Budding Artist. Burnt sienna is sold prepared in tubes, whether oil, acrylic, gouache, or watercolor, so there is no need for you to obtain a sienna yourself and set fire to it.
Anonymous, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, city withheld. The only antidote to human mortality is the belief that one will die reconciled to one’s Maker, and all will be well in the next life; or perhaps the certainty that one will leave a spotless reputation to inspire future generations to emulate one’s example. Or you could try not to think about it. That might cheer you up.
April Showers. Origami is a delicate art requiring skill and practice, and therefore probably not suitable for your Labradoodle.
Wondering in Wilmerding. Unfortunately, the fact that someone is paid a living wage for writing does qualify him to call himself a professional writer, regardless of what you think of his output.
Bighouse Bill. If you are a good swimmer; otherwise, as you point out, you have only thirty-four months to go, and you might as well settle in.
Aunt Bertha of Bellevue. It is considered proper to wear team colors in a wedding party only if your team is in the playoffs; otherwise, you should consider yourself bound by the bride’s decision.