Anti-Agnotology

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NEWS FLASH: Unknownst to the white-coated cretins at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose, but knownst to us, The WORD has run off AGAIN, stowing away in the bookmobile Sunday afternoon while the guards were crocheting and watching football. He returns, conveniently, just as classes recommence for the “Spring” term, in hopes of dispelling at least a little agnotology in time for the Iowa caucuses and the rest of the 2016 crazy season. —TP

 
Self-Delusion

“Ignorance is not just the not-yet-known, it’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you ‘not to know.’” 

—Robert Proctor, Stanford science historian who coined the term agnotology, “the deliberate propagation of ignorance,” “The man who studies the spread of ignorance,” BBC, Jan. 6, 2016

• Editorial Comment: No, you do not have the right to remain ignernt.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Celestial








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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The Book on Books

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‘Oh my god! He’s reading a book!’

ST. MUMBLES, California — That rumbling off the Pacific Coast, first reported as a 4.5-magnitude undersea tremblor, and then feared to be North Korea’s bomb test, has now been traced to the remote rock occupied by the sanitarium holding The WORD.

St. Mumbles, former Addams Family vacation retreat.

Incarcerated for a month-long drying out period, the global purveyor of blather, Today’s WORD on Journalism, is reported to be waking up, according to worried staff at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.

“He’s been in the Omphaloskepsis Unit,” said an attendant who asked not to be identified. “Pretty quiet, despite everything. But then, well, I guess we forgot to Go Set a Watchman over the book cart.”

It had been somewhat vainly hoped that confining The WORD incommunicado would detox the serial gadfly from quotable material from The Donald, so-called “armed ranchers” and other whackos, and the kindly white-coated staff regularly tossed the inmate’s sound-proofed cell for cell phones, iPads and other links to the troubled outside world.

“We didn’t think about books,” confessed Chief of Verbosity Containment Philip O’Shaddup. “Apparently there was a big box from Amazon backed into his Christmas pudding.”

Indeed, it appears books are everywhere, once again infesting a world that had been intellectually contained by Tweets, texts and Faux News. End-of-year reports show that the sale of subversive paper in the form of books is actually on the rise again, like a rash that just won’t go away, says Lillian the Librarian at the Ray Bradbury Center for the Burned Book.

“571 million print books were sold in 2015, 17 million more than the year before,” she said.

So books are back in 2016. The WORD will be too, “the sooner the better,” said O’Shaddup. “Fair warning. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

-30-

HoHoHo

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Tinseltime

Semester’s over; the students are stacked on the sofa with care. 

The white-coated guys from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose have trundled the WORD off to a rain-soaked rock for the holidays. 

So that’s it for me, too, Gentle Reader. Time to deck the halls and a-wassailing go. Have a lovely holiday, a safe and happy new year, and we’ll see who escapes again in January to trouble a troubled world.

—Ted Pease, WORDmeister and Professor of Interesting Stuff, Christmas 2015

• Editorial Comment: HoHoHo.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Stella Elf








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Post-Mortem

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‘Post-Fact’

“Tonight’s debate will present another opportunity to test the theory that politically appealing fictions grab more voters than facts do. And news organizations are ramping up their fact-checking operations in anticipation of nights like tonight — though whether they are really responding to popular demand or trying to make facts matter against the prevailing odds may be a harder question to answer.

“‘There seems to be a trend story that . . . facts don’t matter and the electorate isn’t interested in facts,’ said Eugene Kiely, the director of one of the oldest fact-checking websites, FactCheck.org.”

“‘As long as politicians open their mouths we have a job,’ he said.”

—Hadas Gold, reporter, “Fact-checking the candidates in a ‘post-fact’ world,” Politico.com, Dec. 15, 2015 

 

• Editorial Comment: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good campaign.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Plaza Sunset, Arcata, California








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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News from Florida

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Primal Ooze

“[T]he human race is actually de-evolving, . . . we are moving backward on the evolutionary scale. If you picked the headlines from the five largest newspapers in Florida every day, you could make a very solid case that the human race was slipping backward into the primal ooze.” 

—Carl Hiaasen
, writer and Miami Herald columnist, “Carl Hiaasen on Human Weirdness,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2010

• Editorial Comment: Let’s not even mention, say, Iowa.




PeezPix by Ted Pease

Hammond Multiplex











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Trolling

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. . . for a Sentence

“The act of fishing, particularly fly-fishing, is similar to the act of writing. The masochistic urge to wake in the predawn hours and stumble with loaded thermos toward an icy cold stream to catch something you ultimately let go is not dissimilar to the quirky yearnings that guide a writing life. 

“Both activities draw adherents who crave and breathe solitude. Both fly-fishing and writing abound with foible and reward. Both offer fissures of clarity amid the ambiguity of everyday life. Both can give you hand cramps.” 

—Holly Morris, writer, editor, producer and fisherwoman, “Fumbling After Grace: Fishing & Writing,” The New York Times, 1997 

• Editorial Comment: And there’s all that clean-up.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Waiting for Inspiration








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Neutral Reportage

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Staff Memo

“We’ve gotten a question or two about how to talk about Donald Trump in social media — and whether calling him, say, a liar and a racist violates our policy asking . . . you not to be political partisans. . . .”

“It is . . . entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist, as the politics team and others have reported . . . BuzzFeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts. . . .”

“There are, of course, other good reasons not to engage in US Twitter’s political troll wars and I’d generally advise against it, but there’s nothing partisan about accurately describing Donald Trump.” 

—Ben Smith, editor, Buzzfeed, in staff memo on appropriate use of social media, in Eric Wemple, “Neutral journalism model is straining under pressure from Donald Trump, tense times,” The Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: The Donald has sent the press into a tizzy. Along with the rest of sentient beings.

This deserves a brief treatise on the role of the press: “Neutral reporting” sounds like it should be a good thing. But it’s often not: “balancing” ridiculous claims does no one any good, and news consumers understandably wonder sometimes if reporters are co-opted or just stupid when they carefully get sources on all “sides” to discuss thoughtfully whether up may really be down. Sometimes, as Einstein might have observed, a braying ass is just a braying ass.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Stella Rain Watch











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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What Research Shows

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Note: It’s much more fun to listen to Cleese say this than to read it. So if you can, click here and watch him on YouTube. Read along and see if you move your lips.

Stupid Season

“I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. 

“You see, if you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are. 

“There’s a wonderful bit of research by a guy called David Dunning at Cornell, who’s a friend of mine, I’m proud to say, who’s pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means that if you’re absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it. 

“And this explains not just Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.”

—John Cleese, citizen-philosopher and minister of Silly Walks, “John Cleese on Stupidity,” YouTube, 2014 (Thanks to alert WORDsters Barry Kort, Ann Berry and many others who apparently monitor stupid issues.)

• Editorial Comment: There are so many applications of this wisdom on stupidity that it’s hard to know where to start.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

After Yesterday’s Rain, Arcata, California







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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8 Million Stories

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Finding the Flower

“[W]e have gone from a scarcity-based information economy to a glut information economy. In the old days, finding the thing that you needed was like finding the flower in the desert — you’d have to go out into the desert and find the flower. And now, it’s like finding the flower in the jungle — or worse, finding the flower in the flower gardens.” 

—Neil Gaiman, English science fiction author, “Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last,” Brainpickings, June 2015 

• Editorial Comment: 8 million stories in the naked city


PeezPix by Ted Pease

The Burying Ground







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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