You say Ploof, I say Pluff
November 19, 2009 at 5:50 pm | In politics, read this, the media, wine | 1 CommentTags: David Plouffe, First Parish Church Cambridge, Pinkalicious, The Audacity to Win, Upstairs and the Square
David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, spoke last night at the First Parish Church in Cambridge as part of his book tour for The Audacity to Win. I was told that the church was not quite as packed as it had been for John McCain’s (pre-election) talk or even Harold Bloom’s, at which people were packed into the rafters, but there was a solid and obviously sympathetic crowd. I finally put a face to the man who has sent me dozens and dozens of emails over the past two years. I also learned how to pronounce his name. Not “Ploof,” but “Pluff.”
See? There he is!
He spoke broadly of the several threads in the book. First, he emphasized that throughout the election, the campaign refused to judge itself by the news coverage of the moment. Instead of focusing on the split-second media, it tackled small, daily demographic goals — for example, how many undecided females in Terra Haute should be contacted and registered to vote. Plouffe pointed out (helpfully!) that this is still Obama’s tactic. Plouffe explained that the president knows that coming to the right decision on Afghanistan is more important than whatever beating he is taking in the press that day; he ignores the “winds of Washington” (as Plouffe put it) and focuses instead on what his goal was for that day. To talk to a certain general? Read a certain report? Likewise the beating he took just yesterday in the Times over his trip to China. Plouffe assured us that Obama does indeed have the big picture in mind.
Another thread Plouffe elaborated on was the power and the novelty of the grass roots campaign. I didn’t realize that before Obama made the decision to run, he had absolutely no infrastructure. No pollsters, no advance fundraisers. Plouffe pointed out that Obama had been to New Hampshire for a book signing, but otherwise, not to either Iowa or South Carolina (states in which potential candidates tend to find themselves often, for whatever reasons, in the months before declaring their candidacies). And the decision to go “grass roots” was entirely Obama’s. People thought the campaign was crazy to be holding rallies in, say, Michigan in the month before the South Carolina primary, when Michigan’s was months away. But as Plouffe explained, these rallies got people talking far ahead of time. People who would invite their friends to another rally, or to a call center, or to knock on doors in the coming months. Or, of course, to donate money. The Obama campaign had 4 million individual donors, giving an average of $85.
“Why are you giving away all your secrets?!” I kept wanting to jump up and ask him. But towards the end of the talk, the man who regularly sends me emails that begin “Dear K –” finally read my mind. This election obviously will be studied for years to come as a turning point in the use of technology, data, and strategy in a grass-roots setting. Still, by 2012, technology will have rendered many of the 2008 campaign’s tactics obsolete or slow — how many more people will have iPhones? Plouffe wanted to memorialize the election in his own words before others could spin it. Don’t worry, he assured the crowd, I didn’t give away all my tricks.
Once again, my dear friend Erin was my ambassador to culture. Somehow, she knows when interesting authors are popping up on book tours (she has brought me to hear Ann Patchett read at the Athenaeum and has invited me to countless other readings). I have long been fascinated by David Plouffe (and am of course now going to buy his book…) — probably lingering idealism from my lost dream of working on a campaign, something I never managed to do, maybe because I always thought of myself more as a journalist than an real activist.
I love, too, these outings with Erin, often bookended by dinner and a glass of wine somewhere fun (last night: Upstairs at the Square. White Rioja for Erin, envy for me!) Our conversations range from contemporary fiction to comments such as “You know how Puplicious isn’t as good as Pinkalicious, and Goldilicious is even worse?” to our toddlers’ verbal skills to creative writing classes. I got home late (for me), long after both Tim and Little Bug were asleep, but invigorated by a crisp cold night in Cambridge. This city of intellectualism, liberalism, culture, and craziness was my first home in Boston — and for all these things I’ll always love it.
Pop Culture Update: What I’m Watching
October 29, 2009 at 8:08 am | In celebrity obsession, the media | 2 CommentsTags: Fall TV schedule
There are far more productive ways to spend one’s evening than in front of the TV. If you are an attorney, for example, you can bill some quality hours at home at night (and indeed I do, when I must). You can read – The New Yorker, for example, or a book for your book club (which you never attend because you never have time to read the book). You can go to bed early, so that you can get up early and do something productive in the morning (such as exercise). Despite my post yesterday extolling the benefits of breaking out of routine, however, generally I just like to watch TV. I’m a pop culture junkie, and I’m proud. Other than on Friday nights, when both my People and Us Weekly have arrived and I curl up in bed with my celebrity gossip trash at 8 p.m. (not sure they count as productive reading), I like to curl up on the couch with a glass of wine (not these days, sob!) and decompress in that most American way.
I didn’t watch a lot of TV until I went to law school. I read a lot. I wrote. I went to sleep early. In fact, for a few years, I didn’t even own a TV (perhaps Iwas living out an intellectual aesthete’s fancy? That was misguided.). In law school, however, after a day and usually part of an evening reading case law in very fine print, your brain is quite literally unable to process another word. TV becomes the ultimate — and only — escape. I watched so much TV in law school that I was even DVR’ing re-runs of Cold Case on the USA network. Happily, these days, the queue is much smaller (sort of):
60 Minutes — I DVR this, but rarely go back and watch if I haven’t caught it live, but it has become our Sunday night tradition to eat dinner in front of Morley and the gang and make fun of Andy Rooney. (By the way, Lesley Stahl’s biography, Reporting Live, is very good.)
Gossip Girl — although I’m about to give up on this. Somehow everyone has ended up at NYU together, and sex and alcohol are just not as racy in college as they are in prep school. That being said, I’m surprisingly enchanted by Hillary Duff’s guest appearance! And I love this weekly recap.
The Biggest Loser — essential to only watch this on the DVR, not live, as you can blow through the interminable challenges and weigh-ins and focus in on the good stuff, like all the crying, as Father Scott so accurately depicts every week, here.
The Good Wife — perhaps my favorite new show. I should have thought of the concept: newly divorced mom (her husband, the former Cook County DA was caught with a prostitute and is now in jail for perhaps using state money to pay her…) goes back to work as a first-year associate at a Chicago litigation firm. (Love that Josh Charles from Sports Night is in this too. Have always thought he was cute/dreamy in a nerdy way.)
Glee — OK, this is the best show on TV, despite the slight RT* factor of the musical numbers. Will devote a whole post to it at some point.
The Office — even though it gives me the RTs. I love Jim.
30 Rock — I literally guffaw at this show. I love Tracy Morgan, I’m sorry. And Alec Baldwin. And my father’s law firm was (is) in 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Supernanny — for some reason, even though it couldn’t be more formulaic week to week, we love this show. Schandenfreude?
Saturday Night Live — I just fast forward through this in case something funny happened (e.g., “Dick in a Box”), which 95% of the time it has not.
The Daily Show — on DVR, you can get through this in about 15 minutes.
Curb Your Enthusiasm — almost unwatchable due to the amount of RT’s produced, but this season is much fresher and funnier than it has been as of late. Even though as of late was like two years ago.
Shows I tried this season and rejected:
Cougar Town
Community
Parks & Recreation (I love Amy Pohler, but it hasn’t won me over yet)
Modern Family
Shows on hiatus but usually programmed on DVR
Entourage — have always liked it for the LA-industry references, but it’s getting old. I’m just about over it.
24 — total addiction, even though I don’t like suspenseful movies or shows. If Tim’s not around, I end up fast forwarding through the suspenseful scenes to see how they turn out, and then I rewind and watch them after I know the outcome.
American Idol — I refused to watch for years, but now I’m at the point where I text in my votes! This is a show that you can’t DVR, however, because you’ll inevitably hear about it before you have a chance to catch up. How brilliantly conceived is a show that forces you to watch it live — like in the old days!
Royal Pains — it stars Mark Feuerstein, for whom I have a soft spot since he went to my alma mater and I met him once at a post-college party in Brooklyn. I am so hip.
*If you don’t know what “RTs” stands for, email me and I’ll tell you privately — it’s not quite PC enough to explain here! Basically, though, it stands for the feeling you get when you’re just so embarrassed for the characters on the show that you cringe and can barely stand to watch and would fast-forward through those parts if your husband didn’t grab the remote away and call you a wimp.
Shameless publicity stunt
October 23, 2009 at 9:29 am | In Massholes, read this, the media | 1 CommentHave you heard of Radio Ink magazine?
What, you haven’t? I’m shocked. Well, let me introduce you, here (scroll to p. 26).
Read this
October 22, 2009 at 8:37 am | In read this, the media | Leave a CommentTags: New York Times, David Rhode, Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
David Rhode is a Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban on his way to interview a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. As it turned out, he was taken hostage by the very subject he was supposed to be interviewing (though he didn’t find this out until weeks later) and was held for seven months, until he escaped. This week, the Times has run a five-part series by Rhode, recounting the experience. (Read the first installment, here. Then read the rest. It is worth your time.) It was big news when he finally escaped because the Times and other news organizations had never publicized his abduction to begin with. Rhode’s story is incredible, not only because of the obvious — he was kidnapped by the Taliban — but because of its insights, as a result of his capitivity, into what is actually going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan (for example, how utterly brainwashed these uneducated young men are in their anti-American thinking).
Afghanistan, the news media has recently let us know, is the big story right now. Bigger than Iraq. And, yet, it’s difficult to understand why. Who is the army? The militia? The Taliban? Al Qaeda? Rhode’s reporting starts to delineate the “enemies” from the “allies,” and yet also underscores how difficult it is to tell one from the other. It helps one understand why the decision to send more troops there is so fraught.
My interest in this area also has recently been piqued by Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War. Filkins, another Times reporter, does not merely recount the stories he already reported from this region. Instead, he opens up the rest of his reporter’s notebook — his observations and personal analysis of his reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq, before 9/11 and before and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. We read about his interactions with warlords, politicians, soldiers, and the often overlooked civilian. I was given this book by a pro bono client, whom I’m representing in his application for political asylum. My client, an Iraqi, is mentioned in the book several times. (After reading Filkins’ accounts of some of the things my client went through — things my soft-spoken client plays down — I have moments where I am so glad I am a lawyer and can help someone like this and yet despair that I can’t do enough.) I haven’t read many other books on the conflicts in this region, so I can’t compare Filkins’ approach or effectiveness, but his book has given me important background into why the U.S. is finding it so difficult to accomplish what it wants and needs to in both of these countries.
Career: slashes
April 14, 2008 at 8:03 pm | In law school, read this, the media | 1 CommentTags: Justice Breyers, Marci Alboher, One Person/Multiple Careers, Shifting Careers, slashes
Am putting myself on finals lockdown for the next two weeks, which for me means writing three very large papers that I have, of course, known about for months and months. I did, however, want to post a link to Marci Alboher’s Times blog, Shifting Careers, as well as to her personal website, heymarci.com. Marci is a big believer in the “slash” (as in, actor/director) and believes that not being able to give a simple response to the question, “What do you do?” is actually a good thing. Instead, professional happiness might be a direct result of embracing diverse interests, and she explores this idea in her book, One Person/Multiple Careers. For example, you could be a teacher/writer, a doctor/violin maker, or a lawyer/model (heh heh).
I am a writer/barista/teacher/wine store employee/editor/nanny/lawyer and have always been somewhat uncomfortable about my many slashes (and how they translate on my resume). Marci’s theory, then, cheers me right up, and I especially appreciate her thoughts and articles on being a lawyer/something. She and I actually share three of the same slashes (writer/teacher/lawyer, although our trajectories are reversed), and as a result just had a nice email exchange. I will write more about this concept and about Marci soon, but, alas, I must return to the world of Justice Breyer (yet again…)
Such a distraction
The real beehive theory
April 10, 2008 at 10:28 am | In the media | Leave a CommentTags: internet journalism, Mike Scully
Mike Scully just posted a summary of his theories on journalism in the Internet age on his blog, here. As predicted, they are much more intelligible than my attempt to retell them below!
On the Internet and in life, the importance of showing up
April 8, 2008 at 2:25 pm | In law school, the media | 1 CommentTags: Columbia Journalism School, digital journalism
Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project, is at times a bit too self-congratulatory for me (I’ll admit that this is just because I’m jealous), but being the sucker that I am for anything self-improvement related, I like her general premise. One of her “happiness resolutions” (or whatever she calls them) is to “show up.” I know this is an area in which I could make some major improvements, starting perhaps with not over committing myself in the first place. Drinks with the girls, a board meeting, a lecture: I put them in my calendar with genuine eagerness, but the realities of work, school, and Little Bug often lead me to either cancel or attend begrudgingly. However, in the end, I’m often glad I did go to whatever it was I was dreading. (The lesson is, again, to schedule with restraint so that both the anticipation and the after-effects are pleasant…)
As a direct result of my own vow to keep commitments, then, yesterday I embarked on a long-planned visit with my journalism school classmate, Mike Scully (no, not the Summit Mike Scully—a mistake my sister made when she quickly friended j-school Mike Scully on Facebook only to find his profile to be vastly different from her expectations) in Bristol, RI, where he is a journalism professor at Roger Williams University. I toured the ocean-front campus (which is home to the only law school in RI, and where Justice Scalia happened to be speaking yesterday), we had lunch in the cute, historic town center, and I sat in on his media law and ethics class, during which Mike deftly discussed pornography and the First Amendment in a way that elicited almost no adolescent snickering. Mike was the president of our j-school class (or something akin to it) and went on to a series of big-time journalism positions, but told me that he spent the first part of his career feeling like he was butting heads with the newsroom hierarchy. He’s certainly found his stride in teaching, and he’s very good at it.
Why I’m glad I drove down to Bristol: a whole hour each way—by myself—in a car with top 40 radio, coffee, and my thoughts; being near the ocean; and reconnecting with my love of the news, writing, and journalism. There’s something fun about talking shop journalism-style (no discussion of legal precedent! Or studying for the bar! Or associate pay advances!), especially as the journalism we studied at Columbia is all but defunct: beat reporting, newsrooms, and even what then counted as online journalism have morphed into something we couldn’t have foreseen, much less even imagined. Mike is rightly teaching the importance of mixed-media skills: reporting and writing, but also shooting digital video and creating stories for the Internet reader. In lieu of textbooks for his Digital Journalism class, for example, are tiny $150 Canon digital video recorders with which his students shoot footage to embed into online stories. I’m going to mangle his lucid theory of Internet journalism, but basically he believes that we writers are like bees and the Internet is a beehive (ooph – forgive me Michael for slaughtering your analogy – feel free to comment and restate more eloquently!), and at this juncture, we’re all making it up together as we go along and every one of us million bees can have a comb. The most important thing for a writer, then, is to stake a foothold online. How to do this? Blogs, of course. Blogs that incorporate not only text, but still and video images that bring multiple layers to a story. And then each story itself becomes the tradable unit of knowledge – replacing the greater structure of the newspaper. For example, the average citizen who blogs about the zoning decisions at a city council meeting provides a greater service than can the struggling small-market daily who can’t afford to send a reporter out to cover the same meeting.
Before I get too deep into the theories of internet journalism—which, after talking with Mike, I now even more fully embrace—I’ll circle back to my original point: reaching out, connecting, making the effort can yield important results. Mike urged me to incorporate more images into my blog (iPhone, here I come!), and to start thinking about, even if not on this particular blog, making myself an “expert” in an area that will draw readers (if indeed I still want to keep my finger in the journalism currents). More important, I was able to make a tangible connection to a potential future for my combined interests (and prior experience) in journalism, teaching, and the law. And most important, I was reminded why my journalism school experience—both in terms of its professional breadth and its personal connections—is still so relevant.
I love lists!: magazine over-consumption edition
March 27, 2008 at 9:01 am | In Oprah, Starbucks, celebrity obsession, read this, the media | Leave a CommentI popped up to Christopher’s in Porter Square last night to meet Lindsey and Alison for a quick sauv blanc (since LMR was there, on the rocks, natch) after “work.” It was a warm and lively night at Porter, and it made me miss living in Cambridge. Our conversation was fun and fast, and during its course, Lindsey urged me to share a few lists on my blog. What a good idea because, as it turns out, I love lists! (See someone who has cornered this blog niche, here.) As Lindsey and I lamented the fact that we are too ADD these days to actually read real books (Alison apparently is far too erudite to subsist on magazines, as we do), the first such list is the ridiculous number of magazines I consume each month. Tim gives me a hard time for this, but considering my vices are pretty much limited to Starbucks and magazines (wine is an elixir, not a vice), I would counter that it could be worse.
People
US Weekly (yes, I do subscribe to both…)
Newsweek
The New Yorker
Sports Illustrated (Tim gets this, along with half-a-dozen golf publications—one of which, Women’s Golf, is inexplicably addressed to me—but I actually do read portions of SI from time to time. I have always thought that sports writing can be some of the most creative and fun to read journalism.)
Parenting
Fitness
Cooking Light
Domino
Vogue
In Style
Real Simple
Oprah
O at Home
Yoga Journal
PAW (I do read it! Every week!)
And then, if the cover happens to be intriguing that month, I’ll pick up at the grocery store or drug store:
Boston Magazine (I like to see what Boston freelancers are in there, e.g., Jeff Klineman)
Vanity Fair
Cookie
Marie Claire (have a friend who is an editor there)
Elle Décor
Metropolitan Home (have a friend who is an editor there)
Bon Appetit (to see if any of Amy’s pieces have made it in)
Entertainment Weekly (though I buy this less now that Troy has left)
Runner’s World (it’s true: I buy it when I need to get inspired)
I can justify some of this because I used to be in the “business” – I like to look at the mastheads and see who is doing and writing what. But I could and should cut back on the subscriptions. Fitness, for example, is a total waste. I also rarely read through Parenting, but for some reason get it for free (I think it came with a 1-800-Diapers.com membership?). And it’s not like I’m pulling recipes out of Cooking Light these days. But when a big, fat In Style, Domino, or Vogue appears once a month, I look forward to climbing into bed that night. And the weekly People and US Weekly delivery is like a martini in the mailbox – utter Friday night brain candy.
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