RSS in Plain English

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There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies (NYT)

...Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times.

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

Mr. Halberstam went on to write more than 20 books, including one on the Korean War scheduled to be published in the fall.

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Midnight blogger exposes a scandal (National Post)

Online journal credited with breaking case against Duke lacrosse players

Mary Vallis, National Post

KC Johnson does not fit the stereotype of blogger, journalist, legal analyst or lacrosse fan.

Yet in the last year he has become all four. The bow tie-wearing, Harvard- educated professor is the prolific blogger behind Durham-in-Wonderland, writing hundreds of posts about the Duke University sexual assault scandal. A tenured history professor at Brooklyn College in New York state, he stays up until midnight to post his latest musings on the case, even though he is five states from the action in Durham, N.C.

One of the accused lacrosse players publicly thanked Prof. Johnson for his "diligent work exposing the truth" after the North Carolina Attorney-General dropped the charges against the three last week. Indeed, some of the defence lawyers relied on the blog to help build their court arguments. (more...)

Bloggers Debate Whether Students Carrying Their Own Guns Could Have Prevented Massacre (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

Bloggers Debate Whether Students Carrying Their Own Guns Could Have Prevented Massacre

By SCOTT CARLSON

First came mourning. Then, at least in the conservative blogosphere, came outrage and speculation: If students at Virginia Tech had been carrying handguns, would this tragedy have happened? Would armed students have killed the shooter, or shooters, within the first few minutes of his rampage?

"These things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns," wrote Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor well known for his conservative blog, Instapundit. "I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset."

In the annals of campus mayhem, there is precedent for such rough justice. Peter Odighizuwa, who shot professors and students at the Appalachian Law School in 2002, was apprehended by armed students (The Chronicle, January 17, 2002). Charles Whitman, who fired at people from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin, took fire himself, not only from police but also from armed civilians. The Texas incident led President Lyndon Johnson to push for stricter gun-control laws.

The Virginia Tech shootings will very likely re-energize the debate about guns on both sides. To gun advocates, the incident had a special resonance: Virginia has a law that allows citizens to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons, but most universities in the state prohibit students and employees from bringing guns to the campuses. (more...)

After Deadly Massacre at Virginia Tech, Students Question University's Response (Chronicle of Higher Ed).

As darkness fell over the Virginia Tech campus here on Monday night, hundreds of students clutched one another in tears at the Holtzman Alumni Center to wait for news about friends they feared had died in the deadliest shooting rampage in American history.

Hours earlier a gunman had opened fire in a classroom building, killing 30 people and injuring at least 30 others before turning the gun on himself. Before that, the police say, he killed two people in a dormitory.

The rampage stunned those on this close-knit but sprawling 2,600-acre campus that is nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains.

And even as Virginia Tech reeled from the massacre, many people questioned the university's response. They wanted to know why it took more than two hours to notify the 26,000-student campus of the first shootings, and why more buildings were not locked down sooner. (more...)

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 (NYT)

By DINITIA SMITH

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of science fiction, philosophy and jokes, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

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Gather.com First Chapters Writing Contest: Round 2!

Thanks to all of you who voted for Candy Korman in Gather.com's First Chapters Writing Competition. She made it to the second round! Yes, Wendy and Alice is one of only twenty and the competition is heating up.

The contest started with more than 2,500 entries and there only 20 semifinalists:

* Scott Auden—Colchester, CT
* E.J. Churchill—Phoenix, AZ
* William Delia—Broadalbin, NY
* Geoffrey Edwards—Chicago, IL
* Judi Fennell—Philadelphia, PA
* Eric Goodman— Baltimore, MD
* William Hershleder—Minneapolis, MN
* Christopher Hudson—Jackson, MS
* Candida Korman—New York, NY
* Jeff Kozlowski—Carlsbad, CA
* J. M. LeTurk—San Francisco, CA
* Geeta Menon—Los Altos, CA
* Scott Middlemist— Phoenix, AZ
* Robert Moscoso—Forest Hills, NY
* Rebeccah Ruby—San Francisco, CA
* Stephen Prosapio—Oceanside, CA
* Rachel Schipul—Houston, TX
* Terry Shaw—Knoxville, TN
* Kieran Shields—Saco, ME
* Denise Wadsworth Trimm—Birmingham, AL

This is the American Idol of novelists and the grand prize is a book contract from Simon and Schuster. Please help her move into the next and final round by voting on chapter 2. You do need to be registered in order to vote. Here's a little sample from chapter 2:

Alice bought the New York Times to read on the subway. She'd taken the entire day off as a personal day. She'd start at the doctor's, and then treat herself to lunch and an afternoon of shopping.

She scanned the front page; it was a map of world trouble and intolerance. The Chinese had expelled a few Western European aide workers for promoting Christianity. This reminded Alice of the Taliban's whip-wielding religious police. Sandy Dodger, once a major, anti-abortion protester and now the president of the American Family Values Foundation, was calling for a boycott of all the major book chains that carried "obscene materials." A rural police force was defending racial profiling as a means to deter crime. There was a rise in anti-Semitic activity in the old Soviet States. And the Mayor's Decency in Art Committee was meeting to discuss a controversial art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

Alice looked at her watch. What year was it? She couldn't fathom the backlash that seemed to be overtaking the world. For every step forward toward tolerance and freedom there seemed to be an equally large lurch backward in time.

She turned to the editorial pages. Wendy Liddell was among the artists being targeted by Sandy Dodger. He said her nudes were " . . . an open invitation to deviants" while the op-ed writer deemed her photos " . . . the best example of how art is influenced by the changing mores of the media. Ms. Liddell's work is a direct response to the shock bar that is raised and raised and raised with each succeeding show. But with all the heat generated by the images, they still maintain the beauty that makes them art and not merely fashion."

Pearls Before Breakfast (WaPo)

What happens one of the greatest violinists of this generation tries his hand as a street musician?

The Washington Post tries an experiment in context, perception and priorities.

Trash Talk Radio (NYT)

By GWEN IFILL

Washington

LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me. (more...)

A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs (NYT)

By BRAD STONE

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.