Journalism | Journalism
Feb.24.2010
The dead man's mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d lowered herself onto her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great.
As the winter wind came cold...
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Feb.23.2010
Memo
To the Attention of:
The Very Late Mr. Shakespeare or whoever wrote those plays, sonnets.
Oh, you know what I mean.
CC: The equally but not as late Mr. Nash.
Subject: What you may have worried about occasionally but for decades I have worried about constantly.
You had the...
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Feb.22.2010
It’s lazy, that’s why -- Overuse of indefinite pronoun muddies communication.By Penney Kome
It’s the introduction to half the articles I receive. It’s supposed to be teasing, tantalizing, an invitation to explore its mysteries. In fact, it’s just annoying to me, and (I venture) to most readers.
I...
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Feb.11.2010
Here's a whimsical video demponstrating that the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is a better place from which to observe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than a West Bank refugee camp or an Israeli military base. Seriously. And yet not.
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Jan.22.2010
JERUSALEM — The American humorist Caskie Stinnett once wrote that “a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.” In other words, someone who doesn’t make his meaning so clear that one is both afraid of the trip to hell and angry...
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Jan.21.2010
Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, I really don’t.
It’s too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With shocking self-obsession, it thinks the...
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Jan.15.2010
The best thing about moving from journalism to fiction writing is that people show you more respect.
As a journalist covering a contentious issue like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I was often subject to rather nasty verbal attacks during public speaking engagements. For a partisan of either...
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Jan.07.2010
Ever since I walked away from traditional journalism in 1960 to produce the periodical which touched off the so-called "Alternative Press" movement, The Californian, my major purpose in writing has been truthseeking. Eventually it resulted in my being blacklisted from periodicals that...
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Dec.28.2009
From significant advances in the field of personalized medicine–– which uses information regarding an individual’s specific genetic make-up and environment to diagnose and treat diseases–– to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to five brilliant women and the “miracle on the Hudson,” the year 2009 is...
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Dec.11.2009
"In the 21st century, can facts matter?"
Good question from Mitch Kapor, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at a UC Berkeley forum on the Future of the Forum last weekend. "How do we make facts matter? Or is that hopeless?"
Ouch.
More potential bad news for...
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