“The horror….the horror”

A well-worth reading article by 30 years old journalist Michael Hastings. For me, it’s less about taking side (either for the Obama administration of for McChrystal strategy and ideas) than about the complex difficulties surrounding any large scale war operations. It’s somehow reminescent of McNamara’ account of what he called “The Fog of War” in Errol Morris’ documentary of the same name (2003). Anybody who ever saw Coppola’s Apocalypse Now will likely remember the extensive use of smoke and fog and the effect it has on the rendition of the story.

Newsweek as an short interview with Michael Hastings explaining how the Rolling Stone’s piece was written.

An excerpt taken from the fascinating (really) account of Mazoltuv Borukhova’s Trial. The way Malcolm’s puts it could be used, I think, to illustrate the existential implication of “cognitive dissonance”.

Janet Malcolm :

“(born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).” (wikipedia)

Excellent article on the subject : Toobin makes an explicite effort to restrain himself to the presentation of hard (legal) facts.

Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer to The New Yorker. He is also “the author of five books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, which won the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize” (TNY). Check his official website.

Interesting article overall. But the quotation above is problematic, for it could be argued that a change of medium would result in a change of message (right Marshall?). The anticipated disappearance of traditional newspapers should be studied (before being condemned or celebrated) as a global change in the means we use to shape our experience of the world and, thus, in the world itself. The news won’t be the same. Our experience of the news will change.