Defining Elitism

In the wake of Bittergate, the chattering classes are taking another look at America’s elite — and deconstructing what the term “elite” really means. Politicians eschew the label, of course — cue the whiskey shots and Budweiser chasers — though Fred Barnes argues that Barack Obama is the poster boy for elitism in the US. (The Harvard Law School line on his resume is a dead giveaway, man-of-the-people Barnes contends.) Meanwhile, David Rothkopf describes a “global elite” consisting of 6,000 leaders and influential people, while John Renehan recently took up some prime real estate in The Washington Post to implore the sons and daughters of privilege to sign up for the armed services. Even if Little Lord Fauntleroy doesn’t join the army, it may be of some consolation to everyone else that the better schools in the US are increasingly looking to make the tuition burden easier for everyone defined as non-elite.

A Surplus of Sachs

Along with subsidized farmers, economist Jeffrey Sachs is one of the few people benefiting from the worldwide food crisis. He’s made a host of media stops for his ludicrously timely book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, including one on Talk of the Nation yesterday that featured vivid description of Haitian squalor from photographer Tyler Hicks. But between authoring two pieces in Time magazine and appearing on a stinker segment on The Daily Show, his spiel can get repetitive (even if it’s the most important argument ever labeled “spiel”). We recommend Sachs’ interview with Charlie Rose, where the economist gets down to specific solutions like affordable fertilizer for third-world farmers. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an on-the-ground view of the food crisis, Bruce Wallace penned an excellent report from the Manila slums for the Los Angeles Times.

Dirty Laundry

Money laundering alone may not grab headlines, but it’s playing an increasingly high profile role in all sorts of international criminal activity. A cocaine boom in Europe has fueled an increase in euro laundering — so much so that Jay-Z recently featured euros in a video, rather than greenbacks — while the rise of Macau as Asia’s Las Vegas has made it the go-to destination for money laundering in the Pacific Rim. Disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught paying for sex thanks to money laundering, and he could end up being charged because of his illegal wire transfers, rather than cavorting with a hooker. In fact, as the definition of laundering expands — and transfers of more than $3,000 must be reported — criminals are looking to new ways of moving large amounts of currency, including new forms of digital money (a favorite of child pornographers, Forbes reports), pre-paid credit cards, and good, old-fashioned cash.

Trapped!

It’s finally spring, and here in DC, that means we have a few precious weeks before it becomes infernally hot and humid. It also means we’re trapped inside our offices, wishing we were frolicking outside. But there are worse places to be stuck — take the poor guy who was trapped in a NYC elevator for nearly two days. The security camera footage on YouTube is enough to make you carry around a stack of good reading, some snacks, and a chamber pot, just in case.

Actually, though, elevator-guy didn’t have it so bad, if you compare his tale to Marie Claire’s story about the formerly subordinated Teressa Wall, whose testimony against Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint church leader Warren Jeffs has led to attacks from the church — and shaky custody of her children. Nor does it really compare to another harrowing story from the same mag, about “long-neck women” in Thailand who are forced to wear coils around their necks, trapped in the role of silent tourist attractions.

Maybe it’s time to head to the beach, so we can heed Adam Sternbergh’s surprisingly fun-to-read advice to un-trap our poor feet from their shoe-prisons — a lifestyle change we’re not likely to make if the ground is anything but sand.

Land of the Not-so-Free

You won’t hear any US presidential candidate talking about it, but prison has been in the news lately. Marie Gottschalk, writing in The Washington Post, discussed the two societies now developing in the US as almost 1 in 100 American adults is currently incarcerated. Add to that a recent piece in The New York Times, which reported that one-fourth of the world’s prisoners are locked up in the US; the land of the free leads the planet in both the number of inmates (2.3 million) and the proportion of the population behind bars (751 per 100,000, some six times the world average). Of course, not everyone sees this as a problem: The same week as these numbers came to light, the law-and-order types over at The Weekly Standard reported that crime in prisons is dropping, along with the general crime stats. On the other end of the spectrum is Italy, where many federal cases are dropped because they’re tied up in court for too long, a work furlough program worked so well one jail had more guards than prisoners, and one crimelord was let out of the stony lonesome because he was too fat for the beds.

Did You Just Double-Dip That Durian Chip?

Only a few months late, Gourmet is jumping on the snack review bandwagon. Their rundown of Malaysian bite-sized oddities suggests replacing your Cheetos habit with famously stinky durian-flavored crunchies, but it doesn’t measure up to Patton Oswalt’s doomsaying proclamation for the KFC Famous Bowl. If you do venture into the land of fishy-sweet edibles, be sure to snack safely — read Harold McGee’s report about a Constanza-inspired study on double-dipping. If each subsequent dip transfers about 10,000 bacteria to the bowl, you might be better off sticking to MSG.

What’s the Matter with Being Bitter?

Barack Obama’s recent comments about how Middle Americans are “bitter” and cling to God and guns have given the chattering class plenty to bloviate about in the post-Spitzer, pre-Pennsylvania primary epoch. Obama sounded suspiciously like Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a 2004 book that expounded for a few hundred pages on the idea of cultural issues trumping economic disparity in politics. Frank pens a witty editorial for The Wall Street Journal, updating his thesis for the age of Obama and the 2008 election, while Bob Novak keenly suggests in The Washington Post that Obama keep the concept but ditch the rhetoric. Meanwhile, The Economist’s man in Washington pragmatically suggests that voters will see through the petty controversy and consider the real issues at hand. Stay tuned — we’ll find out tonight.

Eye on the East

Monthly magazines take a while to assemble an issue, but National Geographic’s stunning May issue — about China and Tibet — is more than a timely stroke of luck. A peek at the bylines reveals some very well-known writers, including novelist Amy Tan and River Town author Peter Hessler, who contributes two stories. What does this mean? One explanation is that a forward-thinking editor reacted to increased attention to the area a few months ago and tapped these reliable writers; if they’re already working on books about China, they must have material that could be speedily repurposed into an article.

The May issue also includes two reprints that offer brilliant perspectives from decades past: one from pre-Communist China in 1971 and a glimpse at a young Dalai Lama from 1955. But our favorite piece in the issue was Lewis M. Simmons’ must-read about the Tibetan-Chinese duality of life in Tibet. Kudos to National Geographic for putting together a sharp issue, right on the news.

Remembering the War We’re Still Fighting

The five-year anniversary of the Iraq war just passed — that’s longer than the duration of many marriages in the US — but it’s looking doubtful that Iraq will take the US out for a nice steak dinner any time soon. For one thing, Iraq is not only politically broken, it’s also physically shattered: 20,000 of the country’s 34,000 registered doctors have fled the country since the US invasion, the Wall Street Journal reports. Four thousand US soldiers have died, another grim milestone in a conflict whose “enemy” continues to shift. The Washington Post ’s Harold Meyerson argues that the Iraq war is the first American war to have had several distinct enemies; first we fought Saddam and the Sunnis, then we fought side-by-side with them against Al Qaeda, now we’re fighting the Shiite forces aided by Iran. Plus, as Newsweek points out, our attempts at cultural diplomacy are in shambles — only three of 19 cultural embeds speak Arabic.

Well, at least it’s Friday.

Hot Writer-on-Writer Action!

A.O. Scott’s tribute to film populist Roger Ebert in The New York Times was more than just a sop to cinephiles; it was a rare peek into the (apparently tight-knit) critics’ circle and a nice treatise on the philosophy of appreciation. It also got us thinking about other pieces featuring writers on writers, the king of which is Wyatt Mason’s hyperliterate criticism of John Updike’s review copies of books — all done in Updike’s own hyperliterate style. Whew.

For the tabloid crowd, you’ll remember when New York magazine’s Vanessa Grigoriadis took things personally after Gakwer mocked her on her wedding day. Commentary revives classical music critic Neville Cardus, and Salon’s tribute to Norman Mailer was the best of the bunch that followed his death, as contemporaries like William F. Buckley and Marlon Brando (and the aforementioned Ebert and Updike) weighed in with fond, uproarious memories of the late rabble-rouser.

Money to Burn

While the recession has battered the US stock market and spurred Congress to dole out cash, the ultrarich continue to spend money like there’s no tomorrow. “When times get tough, the smart spend money,” one particularly clueless-sounding events planner tells The New York Times. “Short of our country going on food stamps, I don’t think we’re doing anything differently.” It’s a trend that the national media has helpfully been tracking for us plebs: Some people are having trouble getting their private jets kitted out, multiple kids are increasingly seen as a status symbol, and brands like Bottega Veneta and Coach continue to flourish and expand (though the more accessible-luxury Coach has seen its stock price tumble). Still, for everyone else, the Los Angeles Times offers a guide to haggling more effectively.

Digg for the Rest of Us

As a user, I find Digg worthless. Whew. It feels so good to say it out loud!

Of course, as the CEO of a small-but-growing online media company, I’d give my left pinky toe for Digg’s traffic. But I don’t find the site helpful, and I’d be reluctant to put my name on its virtual masthead, because so much of what floats to the top of Digg is, well, crap like this.

This isn’t me being an elitist, mind you. I love Digg in theory (communism works in theory, right?); the idea of a community of individuals working independently to promote great content is actually near and dear to my heart. But in practice, Digg as it’s currently constituted is no meaningful filter – it’s little more than a sieve. Sure, you’ll find an occasional gold nugget – but you’ll spend hours in hip waders with your hands in the muck trying to find it. And the irony is that the bigger Digg gets, the less valuable it becomes, because more and more muck is being poured into the system.

This reality means Digg is part of the information overload problem, not part of the solution. The signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated to the point that the filter needs a filter. And doesn’t that defeat the purpose? I mean, who’s got the time?

As it turns out, we do. At noon Eastern today, Brijit will begin covering Digg. Digg, you ask? Alongside the New Yorker and This American Life and The Daily Show and Pitchfork? You bet. There’s great content there, and in the context of Brijit, we think Digg can be a valuable resource for the rest of us, busy people without the time or the inclination to go story-fishing in an ocean of crap.

Brijit takes Digg’s most popular, pulls out the most interesting and substantial items, and sets our community of smart readers, writers, and editors to work boiling them down to 100 words or fewer. And while we’ll credit that we found it in Digg, every abstract links back to the original source, to save you time.

We’re also adding coverage of YouTube and Techmeme today, for different reasons. YouTube has a high clutter factor, too, but it’s search-driven in a way that Digg isn’t, which makes for a better experience for the casual user – you dive in, find what you’re looking for, and hop out. Here the Brijit abstract serves more of a serendipity and discovery function for people with neither the time nor the inclination to visit YouTube every day. As for Techmeme, it’s a pretty terrific algorithmic filter, valuable in almost every way, and we think that a wider audience of non-tech folks would appreciate some of what bubbles up there each day, in a shorter format.

So there you have it. Brijit is covering Digg, YouTube, and Techmeme, so busy people don’t have to work so hard. We hope you’ll let us know what you think.

A Buffet of Criticism

The calls are mounting for world leaders to use Olympic leverage to pry China from its support for genocide in Darfur and human rights violations in Tibet. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and the Economist posted almost the same argument: countries should simply boycott the opening ceremonies, focus only on Darfur. There’s no reason to deny athletes their moment, the reasoning goes, and China is unlikely to budge on Tibet. Even our man, the ubiquitous Cloonster, would support that, while XM Radio host Joe Madison (aka The Black Eagle) is pushing for an out-and-out Olympics boycott.

Time tackles the Why? of the situation, noting that even if President Hu Jintao was willing to effect change (don’t worry, he’s not), the red-tape molasses of the Communist Party would hold him up. But the most creative shaming of the Olympics had nothing to do with genocide — Slate did some quick math to calculate that the Olympic torch’s 50,000-mile tour will burn a quarter-million gallons of jet fuel and spew six million pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. Oh, and the whole torch relay thing was started by Hitler. Think on that.

Mad as Hell?

Some say you have to be a little crazy to be a TV journalist. That idea is wonderfully illustrated by a New York Times Magazine profile of MSNBC host Chris Matthews, replete with the summer-blond anchor staring at himself on TV in a hotel bar and exclaiming, “Hey, there I am — it’s me. It’s me.” Somewhat less crazy was Matthews’ brief rumination on his grandfather (and local Philly politics) in Time, and perhaps Matthews should be given some slack for the recent beating he took over his comments about Hillary Clinton (also referenced in the Times profile). Of course, the pressure of getting paid millions to play a journalist on TV isn’t just getting to Matthews: Dan Rather continues the fight to clear his reputation of the stains of the Rathergate scandal, while negotiations about Katie Couric’s future with CBS were unceremoniously leaked to hungry TV news bloggers and reporters who somehow have full-time jobs reporting on reporting. With all this drama on the airwaves, maybe it’s time to start thinking about adding a new wing to the Newseum.

Polar Bears on the Brink

Here at Brijit, we like cute things, and we like controversy. This week, we got the best of both worlds with … polar bears. Vanity Fair reports that last summer the Arctic lost a half-million square miles of sea ice — that’s polar bear habitat the size of Texas and California combined. (I’m recalling that digital image from The Inconvenient Truth where the polar bear’s ice flotation device melts, and he hangs in the water looking forlorn.) So what? asks The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, who wishes everyone would chill out about the cuddly ones. After all, there’s an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil beneath the arctic seabed just waiting to be got, and evidence of the polar bear’s demise is tenuous, he argues.

There’s another polar bear controversy brewing, but this one’s, well, less of a crisis. The BBC reports that the Berlin Zoo’s new baby polar bear Flocke is threatening the popularity of Knut, who has gotten overweight in his old age (he’s now a year old.) Perhaps Goldfarb and friends should get a good look at Knut and Flocke — in ten years, their Arctic brethren’s only habitat might be the caged variety.

Out of Jail, Free

The Los Angeles Times caught our attention yesterday with a must-read story about ex-con Ken Layton and his struggle to readapt to civilian society. Reporter Susan Brink peppers her narrative with “quotes” from Layton’s inner monologue, projecting a real-life image of convict mentality: “Do unto others before they do unto you.” The piece echoes an earlier one in New York about a Long Island community for released sex offenders. And The New Yorker has yet another heartrending detainment story, this time about the Hutto Center, a privately run center in Texas where children of illegal immigrants are kept away from their parents in prison-like conditions.

Phew. We know that’s a heavy bit of reading, so here’s a break: a real-life farce about Italian prisoners that couldn’t stay in jail if they tried.

Pontiff-icating

Pope Benedict XVI is making his first visit to the US next week, and the nation’s media seem happy to be distracted from the endgame of the Democratic presidential nomination process. Time’s excellent cover story this week takes a look at the Pope’s relationship with America, while The New Republic examines the Pope’s stance on immigration (and, of course, what his visit might mean for the presidential race). Still, not everyone is excited about the Pope’s visit — for example, the Rev. John Hagee, a prominent McCain supporter, has called the Catholic Church “the whore of Babylon” (a controversy The New York Times looked into this week). And for the curious, Time also recently had a rundown of what, exactly, will get you sent to hell these days.

Still, the most amusing Pope-related news comes from the Washington Post, which relates the tale of a YouTube video, a Pope bobblehead, a funny hat — and one unhappy Catholic spokeswoman.

A Different Kind of Cage

The New York Times ran a moving story yesterday about the Sabal Palm Audubon Center, a wildlife reserve in a Texas town that would be stranded south of the planned border fence. But the center’s exotic birds aren’t the only animals whose fate could be affected by an immigration crackdown; the meager population of jaguars (nearly gone from the US) would also take a hit. The Los Angeles Times raised this issue last week when it reported that Congress waived more than 30 environmental regulations for the border fence. But Time showed that sometimes a simple number can be most alarming, reporting that both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton added an average of more than 230 species to the endangered species list each term in office; in seven years, George W. Bush has added just 59.

The Sporting Life

There’s no question that hosting the Olympics is a boon for international prestige. (As well as a cause for international controversy — just ask China.) Oil-rich countries in the Middle East are taking a break from scooping up trophy assets and troubled banks in the West and looking at the benefits of organized sport. Doha, the capital city of Gulf nation Qatar, is angling to host the Olympics in 2016; the country hosted the 2006 Asian Games and has already built an $8 billion athletic complex called Sports City. Across the Middle East, countries are using sports to boost national profile as they move away from economies based solely on oil — Abu Dhabi, for example, has constructed the largest permanent Formula One racetrack in the world. And Qatar is not alone in eyeing the 2016 games: Another emerging market, Brazil, is hoping to bring the games to the Southern Hemisphere.

But What About My Cocoa Krispies?

OK, OK, we get it: The economy is going down the tubes. Commodity prices are on the rise, and the crisis is reaching across the global food economy and into American kitchens. David Ignatius reports in the Washington Post that rice and wheat are at their highest real-terms prices since the 1980s. The New York Times’ Kim Severson tries to make lemonade, arguing that the crisis, having hardly affected produce, meat, and dairy, could mean a revolution in American eating habits, though it seems borderline delusional to think the current price spike will create a middle-class of Michael Pollan clones — would that wishing made it so. Perhaps to save some dough we should do like Slate’s Laura Moser, and get that high fructose corn syrup-monkey off our backs. Or we could avoid restaurants and heed Mark Bittman’s advice in the NYT and master that magic radiation machine: the microwave.

There’s No Science in Baseball!

After a gnarly offseason of steroid-infused discomfort, the fourth estate is celebrating the return of baseball. George Will in the Washington Post considers the neurological underpinnings of Cubs fans’ admirable masochism — 100 years of failure and counting! William Ecenbarger, also in the WaPo, waxes nostalgic about his first trip to a ballpark with his father (whose genes could apparently help him pass a doping test, according to Science News) back in the good ol’ days. But those were the good ol’ days of cheating, too, writes Roger Angell in the New Yorker, when getting an edge meant lowering the mound and shortening the fences, rather than taking a needle in the backside. Lower the mound? Sure, says the Brewers’ William Raasch on Talk of the Nation, but not to cheat; it’s a key to keeping up the orthopedic health of pitchers. Though if you really want them to pitch well, offers David Brooks in the New York Times, try this outlandish approach: discipline.

Respect Your Librarian. But Feel Free To Google.

I spoke at a gathering of librarians last week. Thanks to Jill O’Neill at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) for including me. The 50-year-old organization “for groups that aggregate, organize and facilitate access to information” was hosting a one-day forum on The Future of Bibliographic Control, and wanted Brijit there to talk about user-generated content. I’m always happy to introduce Brijit to a new audience, and with Philadelphia only a quick Amtrak ride away, I was glad to do it.

The other speaker on user-generated content was Susan Chun, the founder of Steve, the art museum social tagging project. Susan has set out to make museum collections more accessible by creating a tool that allows professionals, enthusiasts, and laypeople alike to tag items in more mainstream, less technical ways. Kind of a Del.icio.us for museums. Love it.

She pegged her talk around an email she’d seen while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After hearing the story, it’s hard to imagine anyone questioning the value of collaborative, consumer-focused tagging, especially to institutions with large collections.

The author of the email in question was trying to locate a specific painting. He could describe what it looked like in some detail: a “renaissance” painting with an “hourglass” on a “table” in front of a “man.” But the author knew neither the artist’s name nor the title of the painting. And despite the fact that the Met had a terrific academic record of the painting, replete with provenance going back more than a century, Susan was only able to locate it by asking around among the experts she knew in the museum. Tag it with terms people use, and finding this painting is a cinch. Tag it exclusively with traditional bibliographic information, and it remains hidden.

Project Steve and Brijit are attacking different problems in different ways, but the overarching philosophy is the same. Give people the ability to collaborate and be creative within a structured environment, stand back, and watch the magic happen. My presentation on the hybrid editorial model (slides here soon) highlighted this point.

As I told the NFAIS audience, I know practically nothing about what they were discussing most of the day. I’m no expert on the library-publisher supply chain. I’m unfamiliar with the alphabet soup of industry organizations and projects, from NISO and UKSG’s KBART working group to the OCLC or the EEBO. And I’m not at all interested in whether a particular document is considered a monograph or a serial. And neither is (almost) anybody else.

We’re lucky to have librarians and systems that have put us on a firm curatorial footing for generations. But they have to negotiate legacy systems in a way that we Web-native organizations don’t. I don’t envy the task of trying to shoehorn modern content creation and distribution into standards of a bygone era.

One of the other presenters talked of her frustration with a colleague who lamented the fact that people check Google before the library’s own catalog system. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The metadata of ISSN X, volume this, page that, is not meaningful to the vast majority of people. Metadata at Brijit means the basics of how most people want their content in an increasingly online, mobile world: title, author, source, date, and TAGS. On an article by article basis. And everything with a link back to the underlying material (where available), so that you can go right to it. We’ve built Brijit to dovetail with consumer behavior, not fight it. It’s a search-driven, link-based, short-form world, and we’re just living (and working) in it.

The Travel Media’s Two Cents

What do travel writers, who essentially cover a luxury industry, do when the economy takes a nosedive? Penny-pinch, of course. The theme du jour is tourism on a dime, as budget-traveler Rick Steves and Rick Seaney of FareCompare.com offer money-saving advice on Talk of the Nation today. Similarly, New Yorkers (and tourists) have some resources to work with, as The New York Times went budget grocery shopping last week, about a month after New York magazine printed their wallet-saving guide. Still, these recommendations pale in comparison to travel writer and voluntary vagabond Rolf Potts, who advocates drifting as the ultimate relaxing (and cheap) vacation.

Faces of Disorder

As Dana Priest reported in January in the Washington Post, some 2,100 American soldiers attempted suicide or inflicted injuries on themselves last year, about six times the number in 2002. Since then, post-traumatic stress disorder has been getting increasing attention in the media, from The Nation’s investigation of psychological pressure in the Marine Corps to Rolling Stone’s recent profile of the immortalized “Marlboro Marine.” Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, one of the 500,000 veterans suffering from PTSD, puts a sobering face on the illness, likening his life upon returning home to being “locked inside a hell you can’t escape.” Meanwhile, the New Yorker’s review of Kimberley Peirce’s Stop-Loss — about a soldier who must return for a second tour in Iraq — pegs the film as possibly the definitive film representation of the Iraq War.