It was not so much the rain as the wind that wreaked havoc upon the blue and green vinyl tents that had recently sprung up in startling numbers inside of Zuccotti Square, one Wednesday afternoon in mid-October. Rather than retreat indoors, perhaps to the dry Starbucks around the corner, protesters weathered the storm in what could only be interpreted as a mark of smoldering defiance. They remained outside in the rain, sheltered inside of thin plastic ponchos and clustered underneath tarps.
Local news stations would later report that only half the usual number of visitors showed up that day to protest due to heavy rains. But in spite of a diminished crowd and uninviting weather, there was an unusual energy throughout the square. The handsome young star of a popular television show could be seen loitering contemplatively between aisles of tarp; towards the center of the square fights could be overheard breaking out between several restive protestors; at the park’s edges a few inveterate protestors remained stationed to their posts.
The rainy day marked just over a month since occupiers had first set up camp in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to protest Wall Street’s role in the escalating economic crisis, spawning the controversial Occupy Wall Street movement and capturing the attention of the worldwide media.
The protest, which officially began in New York City on September 17th before rapidly spreading to cities around the globe, was ignited by a radical proposal published in the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters over the summer. The proposal called for 20,000 protesters to assemble, “and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” in what the writers hoped would become a continuation of the protests that began during the Arab Spring earlier this year, and played a pivotal role in the Egyptian Revolution.
The provocative blog post stated, “The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”
The movement, which as of yet has not elected a leader or released a formal list of demands and has been praised and criticized in equal measure for its “headlessness” and lack of cohesion, is unified primarily by a shared sense of moral indignation both at the increasing economic class disparity throughout the United States, and at banking institutions who have been indemnified by the government for their role in the current economic collapse.
Kat Adams, a 27 year old street medic stationed near the Southwestern corner of the park, compared the struggles of the burgeoning protest to those of the Civil Rights Movement. “Civil rights, off the bat, was blocked at every corner,” said Adams. “Because they weren’t far enough into the mainstream.”
Adams said that the present goal for Occupy Wall Street right now is to get its message out.“Have you seen the movie Network?” he asked. When I replied that I hadn’t, he described a famous scene in the film where the frustrated protagonist, a news anchor, shouts on live television that he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. “We’re saying, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!’”
The very nature of the economic practices that led to our present crisis were, by necessity, over the heads of most people. According to Gregg Rule, Senior Vice President of the Portfolio Group and a Financial Advisor for MorganStanley and Smith Barney, it was precisely a lack of public knowledge about the economy and banking system that facilitated the financial crisis.
“Few people in this culture have even a rudimentary understanding of [economic] topics,” wrote Rule, in an e-mail. “The bankers want to keep it that way.”
It was perhaps this perpetuated ignorance regarding the economy that explained in part why media outlets were initially so uncertain about how to cover Occupy Wall Street. In the first few weeks of the movement many journalists were quick to declare that the protests seemed to come out of nowhere.
In hindsight, many financial experts have blamed collusion between the government and the financial industry to deregulate the economy for subsequent practices like increased speculation and reliance on derivatives such as CDOs that led to the subprime mortgage crisis and, inevitably, to the bailouts of major banking corporations.
"The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war,” wrote Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve — and the man who was labeled by many as responsible for risky lending practices that led to the housing crisis — in an editorial published in the Financial Times in March of 2008.
Later that year, in a congressional hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan added, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
To add further salt to the wound, a report released by Bloomberg News in November after the Federal Reserve unsuccessfully tried to prevent its publication, found that the bailouts were even larger than the public had previously been told. “Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system,” read the report compiled by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz. “—More than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”
On October 7th an article on Mashable reported that Occupy Wall Street had spread to 928 towns and cities around the world: from San Francisco, Des Moines, and Denver to global epicenters like London, Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
The extraordinary proliferation of OWS has benefited enormously from social media and its ability to rally people together in service of political causes, a phenomenon Eric Augenbraun of the Guardian disparagingly referred to as “hashtag activism”.
Occupy Together, a website that describes itself as a “hub for all of the events springing up across the world in solidarity with the Occupy Wall St. movement,” and has been linked by Adbusters, occupywallst.org (and even received a Twitter mention from notorious documentarian Michael Moore) is one such example of how activists are using social media to coordinate protests efforts and streamline information. The website recently teamed up with Meetup.org to find, list, and update protest events.
“The GREAT thing about all of this, is that it’s completely in line with the whole idea of this decentralized movement,” read an announcement on Occupy Together. “Any single person can start an action in their area, and where one stands up there will likely be another to join you!”
But while social media may have alleviated the technical burdens of getting people together to protest, other complications are less easily remedied, such as the threat of group arrests and violent clashes with the police, which have occurred in many OWS offshoot sites.
The earliest and perhaps largest incident to receive national media attention was the mass arrest of 700 protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1st, most of which were for disorderly conduct. The NYPD claimed that they only arrested protestors who had wandered into the street and were obstructing traffic. However, many protestors, some of whom are now in pursuing a class-action suit against the city, claimed that they were herded onto the bridge by police officers where they were then effectively trapped—a common police tactic known as kettling.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, has been active in banning kettling in Washington, D.C., a practice she referred to as a case of trapping and detaining.
“You cannot arrest people without causing a crime; it is a complete violation of fourth amendment rights,” said Verheyden-Hilliard. “We’re trying to stop the NYPD from using the trap and detain tactic. We believe that people should have the right to demonstrate without the threat of false arrest.”
Jill Nelson, a journalist and activist who authored “Police Brutality” in 2001, described the kind of violent tactics used by the police against protestors as essentially par for the course, saying it did not surprise her. But Nelson asserted that such displays of police aggression are typically reserved for African Americans, and that the sudden redirection of violence towards young women, specifically young white women, indicates a significant shift.
“It says something profound about the desperate state of rage and alienation and violence,” said Nelson. “Ironically, the police violence, mass arrests, and overall ineptitude have done wonders for OWS in terms of getting the message and images out to a national and international audience.”
Politicians have become widely divided on the subject of Occupy Wall Street, with some, like Nancy Pelosi ,openly lauding the efforts of protestors, and others, like Bloomberg, citing the disruption to business as an unacceptable consequence.
"If you focus for example on driving the banks out of New York City, you know those are our jobs," said Bloomberg on his weekly radio show. “What they’re trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have.”
GOP hopeful Hermain Cain took a slightly more tactful approach saying that he sympathized with protestors who couldn’t find work, but that they needed to lobby in Washington, not on Wall St.
President Obama acknowledged the frustrations of protestors and the overall impact that the financial crisis has had on the American People, pledging to do his part to crack down on abusive practices in the banking industry. But he also invoked the important role banking institutions play in the economy.
We need them to help do what traditionally banks and financial services are supposed to be doing, which is providing business and families resources to make productive investments that will actually build the economy,” said President Obama.” But until the American people see that happening, yes, they are going to continue to express frustrations about what they see as two sets of rules.”
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Internship Feature
Intense debate swirled around the blogosphere last spring following the conclusion of an online charity auction. The event, hosted by the Manhattan-based website Charity Buzz, was held in benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights; the scandal arose after an anonymous bidder snapped up the evening’s prize for a cool $42,500.
The auction’s hosts had not exaggerated when they called their prize “a dream package.” But it was not a celebrated piece of art, or a luxury sports car. It was most certainly not an exotic vacation.
It was an unpaid, one-week internship at Vogue, and it had been donated by reigning fashion titan, Anna Wintour.
Charity Buzz, the company responsible for auctioning off a growing number of internships including the one donated by Ms. Wintour, is a prime example of the rising value of unpaid internships.
The company, which launched in 2004 and now includes a staff of over 40 people, describes their mission as pursuing “increasingly cutting-edge ways to harness technology and pop-culture to benefit our nonprofit partners and provide even greater opportunities for our bidders.”
At any given time their website offers a slew of high profile internships from magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers Bazaar, to fashion houses like Versace and Diane Von Furstenberg, and even to brokerage firms like Cantor Fitzgerald.
For overzealous parents, Charity Buzz represents yet another new way to pave the way for their offspring. In a 2008 article by The New York Times entitled “To the Highest Bidder”, Kathi Cline of Tuxedo Park, NY described the $4,500 internship she purchased at Harper’s Bazaar through Charity Buzz—a Christmas gift for her stepdaughter—as a way to narrow down her career path.
“She wants to go into the fashion industry, but she’s not sure what aspect she wanted,” said Cline.
The Times article did not pass by without receiving its share of moral indignation. An essay by Anthony Paletta posted just two days later, to the website “Minding the Campus, challenged that internship auctions were just one of many increasingly elitist (or as Paletta says, “bizarre”) practices aimed at getting the children of wealthy parents into the best colleges possible.
“At least the auction is admirably direct,” wrote Paletta. “It makes no pretense of rewarding merit, highly unlike the countless internships gained through nepotism that now masquerade as genuine accomplishment.”
For several years now, insiders and observers alike have called the state of the publishing industry a “crisis.” Even amidst claims that the industry has started to rebound, The Pew Research Center came out with a report this year, which found that, “circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%” in 2010.
But while the bad economy has led to a shortage of jobs, it has not led to a shortage of internships. Nicole Wolfrath, Associate Director of Internships and Career Services at The New School, said that on the contrary, she witnessed an increase in the number of internship offerings this year, an effect she attributes to company downsizing.
“Basically the roles of interns have changed due to company layoffs,” said Wolfrath. “I've read an example of a full time position being eliminated and responsibilities spread amongst two newly developed unpaid internships.”
Such examples, though they undoubtedly occur, breach national regulations aimed at protecting interns from exploitation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor revised its factsheet for unpaid internships, adding a new caveat that interns must not be permitted to displace regular employees, and must be supervised by the existing staff.
Their factsheet also includes two other regularly flouted guidelines: that intern responsibilities should be similar to training that could be received in an educational setting, and that the internship employer should not directly benefit from activities of the intern.
But in practice, employers often use interns to complete necessary tasks that would ordinarily be designated to employees, minus the pay.
“College career centers have expressed concern that students are being treated as employees but not compensated as such,” said Wolfrath.
Caylin Harris, an Editorial Assistant at Good Housekeeping and Director of the “60 Minute Mentor Program” at the website Ed2010, described internships as increasingly crucial, especially in industries like publishing.
Part of Harris’s job at Ed2010 is to pair up recent graduates with mentors in the magazine industry and to dispatch career advice. Harris observed that it has now become common for people striving for a career in journalism to pursue internships even after graduating college.
Unlike most career and internship counselors, Harris’s knowledge comes from personal experience. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse in 2009, Harris found herself in what has today become a routine predicament—armed with a diploma, but lacking any immediate job prospects.
In total, she completed four internships after graduating (while living at home, and babysitting in her spare time), at magazines that included The Week, Pilates Style, Parents Magazine, and W. Rather than being remorseful about the bleak situation, Harris viewed the challenge as an opportunity to prove her commitment and work ethic to those who could vouch for her in the future .
“I sort of looked at it as, ‘It’s a horrible economy, people that are really talented are losing their jobs and I just need to do whatever I can to prove that I really want to be here, and I really want to be doing this’,” said Harris.
“I’ve seen people that have graduated doing internships, and honestly I think it’s a smart thing, because it keeps you in the industry,” she added. “It keeps you around people that, if you do a great job and you work really hard, you know you’ll hopefully at least make a good impression on.”
“From a counselor’s perspective, I can tell you that I've seen many post graduates open to interning since securing full time positions are difficult,” said Wolfrath of The New School. “There are many graduate students with tons of experience similar to alums. All of these individuals are applying for the same internships undergraduates are.”
Harris reaffirmed that increased competition has led to a steady rise in the number of internships that are considered “standard” during college—from 1 or 2, 10 years ago to 5,6, or even 7, now.
But when asked about company downsizing, Harris denied having heard about jobs being outright replaced by interns, though she did concede that many interns are now being assigned greater responsibilities due to the bad economy.
“There might be less [Editorial Assistants] at a magazine, or they’re using more interns,” said Harris. “I think maybe interns are just getting the opportunity to have more responsibility, because there’s more work and less people.”
“Obviously yes, it’s important to get good grades, and it’s important to graduate from school,” said Harris. “But at the same time, I feel like the people that hired me today didn’t care about what my GPA was; they wanted to know where I had been an intern.”
Charity Buzz did not respond to inquiries for this article.
The auction’s hosts had not exaggerated when they called their prize “a dream package.” But it was not a celebrated piece of art, or a luxury sports car. It was most certainly not an exotic vacation.
It was an unpaid, one-week internship at Vogue, and it had been donated by reigning fashion titan, Anna Wintour.
Charity Buzz, the company responsible for auctioning off a growing number of internships including the one donated by Ms. Wintour, is a prime example of the rising value of unpaid internships.
The company, which launched in 2004 and now includes a staff of over 40 people, describes their mission as pursuing “increasingly cutting-edge ways to harness technology and pop-culture to benefit our nonprofit partners and provide even greater opportunities for our bidders.”
At any given time their website offers a slew of high profile internships from magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers Bazaar, to fashion houses like Versace and Diane Von Furstenberg, and even to brokerage firms like Cantor Fitzgerald.
For overzealous parents, Charity Buzz represents yet another new way to pave the way for their offspring. In a 2008 article by The New York Times entitled “To the Highest Bidder”, Kathi Cline of Tuxedo Park, NY described the $4,500 internship she purchased at Harper’s Bazaar through Charity Buzz—a Christmas gift for her stepdaughter—as a way to narrow down her career path.
“She wants to go into the fashion industry, but she’s not sure what aspect she wanted,” said Cline.
The Times article did not pass by without receiving its share of moral indignation. An essay by Anthony Paletta posted just two days later, to the website “Minding the Campus, challenged that internship auctions were just one of many increasingly elitist (or as Paletta says, “bizarre”) practices aimed at getting the children of wealthy parents into the best colleges possible.
“At least the auction is admirably direct,” wrote Paletta. “It makes no pretense of rewarding merit, highly unlike the countless internships gained through nepotism that now masquerade as genuine accomplishment.”
For several years now, insiders and observers alike have called the state of the publishing industry a “crisis.” Even amidst claims that the industry has started to rebound, The Pew Research Center came out with a report this year, which found that, “circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%” in 2010.
But while the bad economy has led to a shortage of jobs, it has not led to a shortage of internships. Nicole Wolfrath, Associate Director of Internships and Career Services at The New School, said that on the contrary, she witnessed an increase in the number of internship offerings this year, an effect she attributes to company downsizing.
“Basically the roles of interns have changed due to company layoffs,” said Wolfrath. “I've read an example of a full time position being eliminated and responsibilities spread amongst two newly developed unpaid internships.”
Such examples, though they undoubtedly occur, breach national regulations aimed at protecting interns from exploitation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor revised its factsheet for unpaid internships, adding a new caveat that interns must not be permitted to displace regular employees, and must be supervised by the existing staff.
Their factsheet also includes two other regularly flouted guidelines: that intern responsibilities should be similar to training that could be received in an educational setting, and that the internship employer should not directly benefit from activities of the intern.
But in practice, employers often use interns to complete necessary tasks that would ordinarily be designated to employees, minus the pay.
“College career centers have expressed concern that students are being treated as employees but not compensated as such,” said Wolfrath.
Caylin Harris, an Editorial Assistant at Good Housekeeping and Director of the “60 Minute Mentor Program” at the website Ed2010, described internships as increasingly crucial, especially in industries like publishing.
Part of Harris’s job at Ed2010 is to pair up recent graduates with mentors in the magazine industry and to dispatch career advice. Harris observed that it has now become common for people striving for a career in journalism to pursue internships even after graduating college.
Unlike most career and internship counselors, Harris’s knowledge comes from personal experience. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse in 2009, Harris found herself in what has today become a routine predicament—armed with a diploma, but lacking any immediate job prospects.
In total, she completed four internships after graduating (while living at home, and babysitting in her spare time), at magazines that included The Week, Pilates Style, Parents Magazine, and W. Rather than being remorseful about the bleak situation, Harris viewed the challenge as an opportunity to prove her commitment and work ethic to those who could vouch for her in the future .
“I sort of looked at it as, ‘It’s a horrible economy, people that are really talented are losing their jobs and I just need to do whatever I can to prove that I really want to be here, and I really want to be doing this’,” said Harris.
“I’ve seen people that have graduated doing internships, and honestly I think it’s a smart thing, because it keeps you in the industry,” she added. “It keeps you around people that, if you do a great job and you work really hard, you know you’ll hopefully at least make a good impression on.”
“From a counselor’s perspective, I can tell you that I've seen many post graduates open to interning since securing full time positions are difficult,” said Wolfrath of The New School. “There are many graduate students with tons of experience similar to alums. All of these individuals are applying for the same internships undergraduates are.”
Harris reaffirmed that increased competition has led to a steady rise in the number of internships that are considered “standard” during college—from 1 or 2, 10 years ago to 5,6, or even 7, now.
But when asked about company downsizing, Harris denied having heard about jobs being outright replaced by interns, though she did concede that many interns are now being assigned greater responsibilities due to the bad economy.
“There might be less [Editorial Assistants] at a magazine, or they’re using more interns,” said Harris. “I think maybe interns are just getting the opportunity to have more responsibility, because there’s more work and less people.”
“Obviously yes, it’s important to get good grades, and it’s important to graduate from school,” said Harris. “But at the same time, I feel like the people that hired me today didn’t care about what my GPA was; they wanted to know where I had been an intern.”
Charity Buzz did not respond to inquiries for this article.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike? (Draft 2)
Article 2- Revised Second Draft
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?
WC: 677
While the rest of New York City is stocking up on candy and other indulgent treats for Halloween, the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park—the culinary base of the Occupy Wall Street protest—will actually be scaling back its food distribution for the weekend.
In what the OWS protest has labeled an effort to “strengthen” their operations, they will be reducing the daily meals they provide for free over the next three days, to more austere fare like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and rice and beans.
Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on for over a month, has received significant media attention for its cosmopolitan cuisine—one article by the The New York Times asked, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting”—organizers within the movement say that the energy currently required by the kitchen to feed protesters cannot continue at the same rate.
“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer that is taped to a plastic folding table in the OWS kitchen. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill our mission to feed the movement.”
But their public claims to the contrary have not stopped the press from reporting the move as an effort to stave off freeloaders. In an October 27th article by The Atlantic Wire, organizer Chris O’Donnell responded by saying, "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about 'freeloaders.’”
One member of the OWS kitchen, however, a volunteer named Nan Terrie, said that kicking out freeloaders is one of the aims of the People’s Kitchen.
Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since the start of the protest, described security issues at the kitchen as downplayed by the press and protest’s organizers.
Aside from dealing with daily grievances from visitors, such as griping and cutting in line, Terrie said that she was recently threatened by a patron who got angry at the kitchen staff for not catering to his needs. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man a special rice krispie snack, he pulled a knife on her, “and called [her] the ‘N word’ several times."
Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, voiced assurance that Terrie’s concerns were not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.
Clouette, who reaffirmed that the decision to scale back on food was not a strike, described the primary motivations as streamlining the kitchen, and giving organizers space to reflect on what direction the protest is headed in.
“Right now there’s a huge amount of energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook,” said Clouette. “That’s not really a sustainable practice.”
When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to operate in the event that the kitchen was closed, Clouette hesitated. “I think the whole shape of the thing would probably change,” he said.
Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at The New School who studies American political movements of the 60s and 70s and has written a book on the topic, said that shutting down the OWS kitchen would weaken the movement, both from a practical standpoint, as well as a symbolic one.
“At one level, folks need to eat, right? And the ability to offer food helps enable a permanent presence of people there,” said Varon. “Second, it is part of an effort to demonstrate that the encampment has the creativity, organization, and discipline to provide for itself.”
But Varon was careful to add that the practical strain of feeding a community is not something that the Occupy Wall Street protest can bear on its own.
“The very fact that there are homeless folks buzzing around the park is evidence of the problems if the US economy,” added Varon. “But it is unrealistic to believe OWS can, in itself, remedy those.”
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?
WC: 677
While the rest of New York City is stocking up on candy and other indulgent treats for Halloween, the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park—the culinary base of the Occupy Wall Street protest—will actually be scaling back its food distribution for the weekend.
In what the OWS protest has labeled an effort to “strengthen” their operations, they will be reducing the daily meals they provide for free over the next three days, to more austere fare like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and rice and beans.
Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on for over a month, has received significant media attention for its cosmopolitan cuisine—one article by the The New York Times asked, “Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting”—organizers within the movement say that the energy currently required by the kitchen to feed protesters cannot continue at the same rate.
“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer that is taped to a plastic folding table in the OWS kitchen. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill our mission to feed the movement.”
But their public claims to the contrary have not stopped the press from reporting the move as an effort to stave off freeloaders. In an October 27th article by The Atlantic Wire, organizer Chris O’Donnell responded by saying, "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned about 'freeloaders.’”
One member of the OWS kitchen, however, a volunteer named Nan Terrie, said that kicking out freeloaders is one of the aims of the People’s Kitchen.
Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since the start of the protest, described security issues at the kitchen as downplayed by the press and protest’s organizers.
Aside from dealing with daily grievances from visitors, such as griping and cutting in line, Terrie said that she was recently threatened by a patron who got angry at the kitchen staff for not catering to his needs. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man a special rice krispie snack, he pulled a knife on her, “and called [her] the ‘N word’ several times."
Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, voiced assurance that Terrie’s concerns were not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.
Clouette, who reaffirmed that the decision to scale back on food was not a strike, described the primary motivations as streamlining the kitchen, and giving organizers space to reflect on what direction the protest is headed in.
“Right now there’s a huge amount of energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook,” said Clouette. “That’s not really a sustainable practice.”
When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to operate in the event that the kitchen was closed, Clouette hesitated. “I think the whole shape of the thing would probably change,” he said.
Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at The New School who studies American political movements of the 60s and 70s and has written a book on the topic, said that shutting down the OWS kitchen would weaken the movement, both from a practical standpoint, as well as a symbolic one.
“At one level, folks need to eat, right? And the ability to offer food helps enable a permanent presence of people there,” said Varon. “Second, it is part of an effort to demonstrate that the encampment has the creativity, organization, and discipline to provide for itself.”
But Varon was careful to add that the practical strain of feeding a community is not something that the Occupy Wall Street protest can bear on its own.
“The very fact that there are homeless folks buzzing around the park is evidence of the problems if the US economy,” added Varon. “But it is unrealistic to believe OWS can, in itself, remedy those.”
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Reading Journal: 12/29/11
Today the New York Times published a front-page story that I think is emblematic of what’s wrong with a lot of NYT reporting. The article was “Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School: Upgrading Their Skills Rather Than Settling for Low Pay” by Catherine Rampell. The problem with it, as usual, wasn’t that it wasn’t well-researched (it was brimming with statistics), or cogently-written (the author makes a persuasive case that yes, more young women these days are using the economic downturn as an opportunity to go back to school instead of working crappy, low-paying jobs). The problem is that the NYT seems to fundamentally downplay the importance of actually talking to the people they’re reporting on.
The article had solid evidence for what the news was: the economy sucks, good jobs are scarce, statistics are showing that a disproportionate number of young women are dropping out of the labor force.
But it also had a truly staggering, almost insulting, number of sense-makers. In total four experts were interviewed, including not one but two economists, a research director at a Chicago think thank, and the president of a community college in North Carolina. And what was the cumulative conclusion of their insights? The shocking revelation that (wait for it....) more young women are enrolling in college. Why we needed four separate experts and a comprehensive info-graphic to confirm the obvious fact that young women departing from the workforce has coincided with young women enrolling in school, is quite frankly beyond me. But thank you NYT for being so thorough.
If only if they could have been equally thorough in their coverage of real live women who are actually affected by this change. In contrast to the experts consulted, only one woman undergoing this transition (a Master’s candidate named Lauren Baker, who recently quit her job at Starbucks to go back to school) was actually interviewed for the article.
As a reader, I found this a little offensive. I understand the importance of experts, and I’m reassured to know that the New York Times has such knowledgeable sources at their disposal, I really am. But if the decisions of young women are only discussed and conjectured about at length by outside experts, while the women themselves are not being given their own voices, this is, what author Kate Zambreno would label, "a huge fucking problem", (especially given that the subject matter of this article so obviously intertwined with complex feminist issues). For shame, NYT.
But anyway, moving on. In an article published yesterday, titled Keeping Boomers Fit for Work, the Wall Street Journal reported on companies that have been making a concerted effort to keep aging workers healthy, to avoid job turnover.
The author reports that, "Duke Energy Corp. offers a special stretching program for its line technicians before they start a shift. Harley-Davidson Inc. has trainers stand ready to ice down inflammations between shifts at one of its engine plants." In contrast to the NYT article, I thought that the WSJ actually did a really good job of covering those making the news, affected by the news, as well as sense-makers.
In terms of news-makers, they interview the director of University of Michigan's Center for Ergonomics (where they have been trying to accomodate their surgeons by adapting surgical techniques that are less physically demanding), both the general plant manager and a senior health and safety specialist at Harley-Davidson, and a general manager of safety and health at the mining company Unimin.
News affected sources here include Barry Poe, a 53-year-old Duke line technician, and Orlando "Gonzo" Meza, a 52-year-old cement-truck driver for Vulcan. There are also specific details about what kinds of changes have been implemented for workers: at Unimin, workers used to have to "carry 40-pound buckets of silicate material down a narrow catwalk to reach a mixing tank, then bend over to tip the silicate into the tank. Now Unimin uses pumps to get that material into the tank", at Vulcan "Chutes used for wet concrete are now made of lighter composite materials instead of steel, reducing the weight to 27 pounds from about 48," and at Harley-Davidson trainers are stationed at on-site gyms, to "prepare exercise routines tailored to individual jobs and have ice packs available at shift change."
For sense-making the author provides an infographic from the Bureau of Labor statistics showing that in a survey of 10,000 middle-aged workers in the private sector, injuries have fallen by almost 10% in the last four years. He also speaks to Joseph Couphlin, director at the AgeLab at MIT who says that "More employers should be preparing to deal with an older, frailer work force."
Overall, I thought the second article was successful because it gave great specifics, had good sense-making, and most importantly, talked to all the right people.
The article had solid evidence for what the news was: the economy sucks, good jobs are scarce, statistics are showing that a disproportionate number of young women are dropping out of the labor force.
But it also had a truly staggering, almost insulting, number of sense-makers. In total four experts were interviewed, including not one but two economists, a research director at a Chicago think thank, and the president of a community college in North Carolina. And what was the cumulative conclusion of their insights? The shocking revelation that (wait for it....) more young women are enrolling in college. Why we needed four separate experts and a comprehensive info-graphic to confirm the obvious fact that young women departing from the workforce has coincided with young women enrolling in school, is quite frankly beyond me. But thank you NYT for being so thorough.
If only if they could have been equally thorough in their coverage of real live women who are actually affected by this change. In contrast to the experts consulted, only one woman undergoing this transition (a Master’s candidate named Lauren Baker, who recently quit her job at Starbucks to go back to school) was actually interviewed for the article.
As a reader, I found this a little offensive. I understand the importance of experts, and I’m reassured to know that the New York Times has such knowledgeable sources at their disposal, I really am. But if the decisions of young women are only discussed and conjectured about at length by outside experts, while the women themselves are not being given their own voices, this is, what author Kate Zambreno would label, "a huge fucking problem", (especially given that the subject matter of this article so obviously intertwined with complex feminist issues). For shame, NYT.
But anyway, moving on. In an article published yesterday, titled Keeping Boomers Fit for Work, the Wall Street Journal reported on companies that have been making a concerted effort to keep aging workers healthy, to avoid job turnover.
The author reports that, "Duke Energy Corp. offers a special stretching program for its line technicians before they start a shift. Harley-Davidson Inc. has trainers stand ready to ice down inflammations between shifts at one of its engine plants." In contrast to the NYT article, I thought that the WSJ actually did a really good job of covering those making the news, affected by the news, as well as sense-makers.
In terms of news-makers, they interview the director of University of Michigan's Center for Ergonomics (where they have been trying to accomodate their surgeons by adapting surgical techniques that are less physically demanding), both the general plant manager and a senior health and safety specialist at Harley-Davidson, and a general manager of safety and health at the mining company Unimin.
News affected sources here include Barry Poe, a 53-year-old Duke line technician, and Orlando "Gonzo" Meza, a 52-year-old cement-truck driver for Vulcan. There are also specific details about what kinds of changes have been implemented for workers: at Unimin, workers used to have to "carry 40-pound buckets of silicate material down a narrow catwalk to reach a mixing tank, then bend over to tip the silicate into the tank. Now Unimin uses pumps to get that material into the tank", at Vulcan "Chutes used for wet concrete are now made of lighter composite materials instead of steel, reducing the weight to 27 pounds from about 48," and at Harley-Davidson trainers are stationed at on-site gyms, to "prepare exercise routines tailored to individual jobs and have ice packs available at shift change."
For sense-making the author provides an infographic from the Bureau of Labor statistics showing that in a survey of 10,000 middle-aged workers in the private sector, injuries have fallen by almost 10% in the last four years. He also speaks to Joseph Couphlin, director at the AgeLab at MIT who says that "More employers should be preparing to deal with an older, frailer work force."
Overall, I thought the second article was successful because it gave great specifics, had good sense-making, and most importantly, talked to all the right people.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Reading Journal: Sources
Reading Journal:
Tuesday Dec. 6, 2011
In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Miram Elder reports on the Russian response to a recent parliamentary election where Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, lost a significant amount of seats.
I found this story really tough to dissect because there’s so much going on in it (and so many sources cited). Elder provides quotes from 8 different sources that cut across the political spectrum.
There seemed to be three main things that constituted the news or the “what” of the article: firstly that Putin’s party is waning in power (this clearly carries the biggest impact), secondly that news of election results were followed by protests, and thirdly that the protest was met by a police crackdown ordered by the Kremlin.
The lede indicates that the immediate news we should be focusing on is that “The Kremlin mobilised thousands of police, interior troops and pro-government youth groups on Tuesday night to crack down on protests,” but clearly this is just a smaller piece of bigger news.
The police seem to be the news-maker of the immediate news, and on that score they are used as a source. But the bigger news-maker is probably the Russian parliament who voted Putin’s party down, and no one from the parliament is quoted.
I categorized the protestors as the people affected by the news, since they weren’t involved in the results, but will be voting in the upcoming election (which, by the time I post this blog entry, may have already happened)—their voices were the most represented in the article. But the only sense-making came from the author, in specific contextual examples like her inclusion that if Putin were to get reelected he would be in power until 2024. Similarly in the final paragraph she touches on the importance of LiveJournal in Russia as a mobilizing platform for youth. I think both of these areas could have used quotes from experts to further back up the author’s assertions, and also because the article feels uneven in its coverage of protestors vs. experts.
The NYT published an article on Thursday following up on comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that held the Russian election had not been conducted fairly, and the response that her comments elicited from Putin.
I thought that the New York Times piece was more insightful and had a more balanced spectrum of sources than the Guardian. The authors, Herszenhorn and Myers, set up the article first with a play-by-play of Clinton and Putin's (the two news-makers here) interchange.
First they bring in Putin's displeased remarks about Clinton“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that [election results] were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers").
Then the authors go on to analyze Putin's statement, concluding that his choice to "single out" Clinton was "strikingly personal","effectively thrust the United States on the side of the protesters in the streets challenging the Kremlin’s authority." They point to Clinton's previous "outspoken" criticism of the election as a motivating factor behind his strongly worded response.
The authors then segue back to the protests that broke out after the election, and bring in a new voice: Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political analyst. As a key sense-maker, Markov affirms that the opposition demonstrations are indicative of a widespread belief in Russia that there was fraud at play in the election, "especially", as he says, "in Moscow and Petersburg."
His predictions about what would eventually come out of the elections were especially helpful to understanding the broader implications of Putin's discrediting remarks toward Clinton—and to rising tensions between the US and Russia. "Mr. Markov said he expected the government to treat the public like a whining child. 'The authorities will attempt to conduct themselves with society as a parent would a child who is crying and demanding some kind of toy,' he said. 'In this case, it is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy, but rather distract him with something else.' Mr. Putin’s accusations of foreign meddling could provide that distraction.
I think that the core news of this article (Clinton's allegations that the election were unfair) most directly affects Putin and his representatives, and since he was quoted responding to Clinton (as was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin) the news-affected perspective seems covered. I don't think they needed to include protestors, but it probably wouldn't have hurt.
Tuesday Dec. 6, 2011
In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Miram Elder reports on the Russian response to a recent parliamentary election where Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, lost a significant amount of seats.
I found this story really tough to dissect because there’s so much going on in it (and so many sources cited). Elder provides quotes from 8 different sources that cut across the political spectrum.
There seemed to be three main things that constituted the news or the “what” of the article: firstly that Putin’s party is waning in power (this clearly carries the biggest impact), secondly that news of election results were followed by protests, and thirdly that the protest was met by a police crackdown ordered by the Kremlin.
The lede indicates that the immediate news we should be focusing on is that “The Kremlin mobilised thousands of police, interior troops and pro-government youth groups on Tuesday night to crack down on protests,” but clearly this is just a smaller piece of bigger news.
The police seem to be the news-maker of the immediate news, and on that score they are used as a source. But the bigger news-maker is probably the Russian parliament who voted Putin’s party down, and no one from the parliament is quoted.
I categorized the protestors as the people affected by the news, since they weren’t involved in the results, but will be voting in the upcoming election (which, by the time I post this blog entry, may have already happened)—their voices were the most represented in the article. But the only sense-making came from the author, in specific contextual examples like her inclusion that if Putin were to get reelected he would be in power until 2024. Similarly in the final paragraph she touches on the importance of LiveJournal in Russia as a mobilizing platform for youth. I think both of these areas could have used quotes from experts to further back up the author’s assertions, and also because the article feels uneven in its coverage of protestors vs. experts.
The NYT published an article on Thursday following up on comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that held the Russian election had not been conducted fairly, and the response that her comments elicited from Putin.
I thought that the New York Times piece was more insightful and had a more balanced spectrum of sources than the Guardian. The authors, Herszenhorn and Myers, set up the article first with a play-by-play of Clinton and Putin's (the two news-makers here) interchange.
First they bring in Putin's displeased remarks about Clinton“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that [election results] were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers").
Then the authors go on to analyze Putin's statement, concluding that his choice to "single out" Clinton was "strikingly personal","effectively thrust the United States on the side of the protesters in the streets challenging the Kremlin’s authority." They point to Clinton's previous "outspoken" criticism of the election as a motivating factor behind his strongly worded response.
The authors then segue back to the protests that broke out after the election, and bring in a new voice: Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political analyst. As a key sense-maker, Markov affirms that the opposition demonstrations are indicative of a widespread belief in Russia that there was fraud at play in the election, "especially", as he says, "in Moscow and Petersburg."
His predictions about what would eventually come out of the elections were especially helpful to understanding the broader implications of Putin's discrediting remarks toward Clinton—and to rising tensions between the US and Russia. "Mr. Markov said he expected the government to treat the public like a whining child. 'The authorities will attempt to conduct themselves with society as a parent would a child who is crying and demanding some kind of toy,' he said. 'In this case, it is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy, but rather distract him with something else.' Mr. Putin’s accusations of foreign meddling could provide that distraction.
I think that the core news of this article (Clinton's allegations that the election were unfair) most directly affects Putin and his representatives, and since he was quoted responding to Clinton (as was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin) the news-affected perspective seems covered. I don't think they needed to include protestors, but it probably wouldn't have hurt.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Felix Morelo: Portrait of a Street Artist
In New York City, unfamiliar faces greet you at every corner; from cursory glances exchanged by passing strangers on the sidewalk, to unreciprocated stares on the subway. But in Union Square, the busied hub of lower Manhattan, faces can be found in a more unlikely source: looking up at you from the ground.
These particular faces cannot talk, but their words are sometimes calcified in chalk speech bubbles drawn next to them.
They are the creation of Felix Morelo, a Colombian street artist, who has been regularly drawing them all over the gum-splotched hexagonal brick tiles that cover Union Square, as well as on neighboring city blocks, for the past three years. Now a neighborhood fixture, Morelo can also sometimes be seen sitting in Union Square with a cardboard sign offering free advice.
For casual admirers and fans of Morelo’s work alike, his chalk faces are often a source of amusement and encouragement. Fans who happen to catch Morelo in the act of drawing his faces will often stop to tell him that his work has cheered them up, on the way to wherever they may have been going. But to the contrary, the faces were born out of a much different emotion.
Looking out on Union Square from a wooden table in a Starbucks on 17th Street, Morelo described anger as the primary motive behind his street art. His face, while quick to break into a smile, instantly hardens when the topic of how he came to create his street art arises.
"People think it's happy, but it's not," said Morelo definitively.
Like generations of artists before him, Morelo has suffered in the pursuit of his art. He was forced to drop out of Parsons, just three credits shy of a earning a BFA, after he defaulted on his student loans. Since then, he has devoted himself to breaking into the art world while simultaneously struggling to support himself financially.
Amid a litany of odd jobs that included construction work, cutting meat as a butcher, and working as a bike messenger, Morelo hit a rough patch that included a period of homelessness, during which he lived on the streets.
“All my failures led me to do the faces,” said Morelo of his mounting frustrations.
But for an aspiring fine artist who found himself unable to catch the attention of the art world or get his own solo show (“I’ve never really been good at networking,” Morelo readily concedes) he was able to seek inspiration from another likeminded figure: a street artist named James De La Vega, who dismissed the gallery world in favor of publicly displayed chalk drawings.
“The big advantage [of chalk] is that it’s legal,” Morelo explained.
He added of De La Vega’s successful method that the trick is in taking simple phrases and “just repeating [them] over and over until you start getting recognized.”
Morelo’s signature phrase is probably his “bad luck spot,” a chalk circle drawn at random on the sidewalk that portends doom for anyone who should step in it.
The realization of quick, easily repeated catchphrases did not come to him immediately. He initially started experimenting with chalk by doing his usual drawings on the sidewalks around the city, until he found that it wasn’t working. That’s when Morelo says he came up with the faces, a theme that had already been pervasive throughout all his drawings. “They signified a longing or desire to be surrounded by people, rather than being homeless, or all alone, no girlfriend.”
When he started drawing faces on the ground at Union Square, a shape began to take hold. “The first time I did 50 faces, and everything clicked,” said Morelo. “I started realizing the pattern would disrupt the hexagon tiles.”
Even better, he found he could that he could churn out a large quantity of drawings in no time at all— each face took only seconds to draw. If he did an entire block of faces in this way, people would have to look at him.
To date, his most expansive project has been a series of faces that stretched from 10th Ave. to Avenue C. along 14th Street.
By making the move to street art Morelo feels that he has finally succeeded in forcing people to acknowledge him; or in his own words, to say, “Look at me motherfuckers! I may not be able to speak properly, but you’re going to look at my work.”
Now Morelo lives and maintains a studio in a space that he rents illegally with his girlfriend. His chief hope for the future is to get grants and fellowships that might enable him to focus on creating art for the rest of his life without having to worry about monetary limitations.
Although chalk is his signature, Morelo says he would love to get commissioned to do murals around the city. Chalk has its own downsides.
“It makes me sad, disappointed it’s not gonna last,” Morelo says of the drawings that gradually fade, sometimes washing away overnight if it rains. It’s like a metaphor for life, he says: “If you see it, take a photograph, because it’s only here for a moment.”
These particular faces cannot talk, but their words are sometimes calcified in chalk speech bubbles drawn next to them.
They are the creation of Felix Morelo, a Colombian street artist, who has been regularly drawing them all over the gum-splotched hexagonal brick tiles that cover Union Square, as well as on neighboring city blocks, for the past three years. Now a neighborhood fixture, Morelo can also sometimes be seen sitting in Union Square with a cardboard sign offering free advice.
For casual admirers and fans of Morelo’s work alike, his chalk faces are often a source of amusement and encouragement. Fans who happen to catch Morelo in the act of drawing his faces will often stop to tell him that his work has cheered them up, on the way to wherever they may have been going. But to the contrary, the faces were born out of a much different emotion.
Looking out on Union Square from a wooden table in a Starbucks on 17th Street, Morelo described anger as the primary motive behind his street art. His face, while quick to break into a smile, instantly hardens when the topic of how he came to create his street art arises.
"People think it's happy, but it's not," said Morelo definitively.
Like generations of artists before him, Morelo has suffered in the pursuit of his art. He was forced to drop out of Parsons, just three credits shy of a earning a BFA, after he defaulted on his student loans. Since then, he has devoted himself to breaking into the art world while simultaneously struggling to support himself financially.
Amid a litany of odd jobs that included construction work, cutting meat as a butcher, and working as a bike messenger, Morelo hit a rough patch that included a period of homelessness, during which he lived on the streets.
“All my failures led me to do the faces,” said Morelo of his mounting frustrations.
But for an aspiring fine artist who found himself unable to catch the attention of the art world or get his own solo show (“I’ve never really been good at networking,” Morelo readily concedes) he was able to seek inspiration from another likeminded figure: a street artist named James De La Vega, who dismissed the gallery world in favor of publicly displayed chalk drawings.
“The big advantage [of chalk] is that it’s legal,” Morelo explained.
He added of De La Vega’s successful method that the trick is in taking simple phrases and “just repeating [them] over and over until you start getting recognized.”
Morelo’s signature phrase is probably his “bad luck spot,” a chalk circle drawn at random on the sidewalk that portends doom for anyone who should step in it.
The realization of quick, easily repeated catchphrases did not come to him immediately. He initially started experimenting with chalk by doing his usual drawings on the sidewalks around the city, until he found that it wasn’t working. That’s when Morelo says he came up with the faces, a theme that had already been pervasive throughout all his drawings. “They signified a longing or desire to be surrounded by people, rather than being homeless, or all alone, no girlfriend.”
When he started drawing faces on the ground at Union Square, a shape began to take hold. “The first time I did 50 faces, and everything clicked,” said Morelo. “I started realizing the pattern would disrupt the hexagon tiles.”
Even better, he found he could that he could churn out a large quantity of drawings in no time at all— each face took only seconds to draw. If he did an entire block of faces in this way, people would have to look at him.
To date, his most expansive project has been a series of faces that stretched from 10th Ave. to Avenue C. along 14th Street.
By making the move to street art Morelo feels that he has finally succeeded in forcing people to acknowledge him; or in his own words, to say, “Look at me motherfuckers! I may not be able to speak properly, but you’re going to look at my work.”
Now Morelo lives and maintains a studio in a space that he rents illegally with his girlfriend. His chief hope for the future is to get grants and fellowships that might enable him to focus on creating art for the rest of his life without having to worry about monetary limitations.
Although chalk is his signature, Morelo says he would love to get commissioned to do murals around the city. Chalk has its own downsides.
“It makes me sad, disappointed it’s not gonna last,” Morelo says of the drawings that gradually fade, sometimes washing away overnight if it rains. It’s like a metaphor for life, he says: “If you see it, take a photograph, because it’s only here for a moment.”
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Anecdotal ledes
Today’s NYT article on Rick Perry begins like this: “COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — Rick Perry arrived on the campus of Texas A&M University in the tumultuous fall of 1968, cut his hair short, regulation army style, and donned a uniform. College students across America were rising up against the Vietnam War, but Mr. Perry, a member of the Corps of Cadets here, would not be among them.”
At first it seems like we’re about to be told a certain kind of story about Rick Perry — probably some laudatory piece about how he defied his college peers and stood up for what he believed was right— but then out of the blue, the article veers off into another direction entirely. That’s what I like so much about this lede; that it keeps you on your toes a little.
Though the article begins with a snapshot of Perry’s college years amid the tumult of the 1960’s, what it’s really about is his military service and how it shaped his later politics (or maybe how his politics influenced his decision to enlist). But his college years at Texas A&M are quickly abandoned after the first couple grafs.
This narrative shift reminded me a little of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” In Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, he begins by sharing a brief but revealing anecdote about an argument Moses got into while on the swimming team at Yale, and the way Moses ends the argument lays the groundwork for “the man he would eventually become.” Although it's a little novel-y I think this kind of coming-of-age storytelling device works well in a profile of an important political figure like Perry, because it gives us exactly the kind of colorful description of Perry that we want to hear: the man he was becoming before he entered into the military or politics (assisted by a great visual detail about his haircut, and an amusing photo of him in his corps of cadets uniform ). It's a good example of how an anecdotal lede doesn’t necessarily need to sum up a ‘thesis’, but can help set up the rest of the story.
The lede in today’s business article “A Voice Suggests Door-Busters Can Wait,” (a story about the employee backlash against Black Friday hours) was less successful. My problem with the lede, which begins “Anthony Hardwick never thought of himself as an activist or even much of an organizer...” is just that it seems like such a boring choice out of a million ways to begin a story. The article itself is such a relatable human-interest story (who wouldn’t sympathize with a guy making minimum wage who had to work through Thanksgiving?), but the lede fails to capture any of that sentiment. And to be completely honest, I tune out a little when I hear the word “organizer” or “activist,” because they're so overused, so I have to wonder why the author chose to use them to hook us.
I also liked the anecdotal lede in “The Witch Wears Silk Suits”, an article that ran in today's metro section of the Times, even though it was pretty cheesy: "It was the night before Thanksgiving, and the Witch Queen of New York was not stirring her brew or flying on her broom. Well, she did have her broom, but she was using it to sweep up the Pagan Center of New York, her headquarters in the Bronx..." I don't usually like campy writing like this, but I think this writer pulls it off by going 100% into it. (The following line doesn't disappoint either: "'Where the heck is that dustpan?' said the witch, Lady Rhea, 60, a Wiccan high priestess who was pulling off a nearly magical level of multitasking..." Another obvious difference about this piece is that the off-beat subject matter demands a little humor. A jokey lede here is more permissible than it would be in either of the above articles. Overall, I didn't think the tone detracted from the piece at all, especially because the woman profiled sounds like such a character that it seemed like the tone fit her personality rather than being condescending.
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