Holiday Redux: The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention

By: | January 1, 2015

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in April 2014, but its applications multiply. 

Wishing you a very happy—and bullshit-free—2015.

I am often wrong. I misunderstand; I misremember; I believe things I shouldn’t. I’m overly optimistic about the future quality of Downton Abbey, and inexact in my recall of rock-star shenanigans. But I am not often—knock wood—wrong in print, and that’s because, as a journalist, I’ve had advanced training in Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP).

Lately, as I’ve watched smarter and better-dressed friends believe all manner of Internet nonsense, I’ve come to appreciate my familiarity with BPP. Especially because we’re all publishers now. (Sharing a piece of news with 900 Facebook friends is not talking. It’s publishing.) And publishing bullshit is extremely destructive: It makes it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between bogus news and something real, awful, and urgent.

While BPP is not failsafe, generations of crotchety, underpaid, truth-loving journalists have found that it dramatically reduces one’s chances of publishing bullshit.

So I believe that everyone should practice BPP before publishing. No prior experience is required: Though it’s possible to spend a lifetime debating the finer points of BPP (and the sorely-needed news literacy movement wants high-school and college students to spend at least a semester doing so) its general principles, listed in a handy, portable, and free—free!—form above, are simple.

Here’s how they work in practice.

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Holiday Redux: The Case for Tracking Outcomes, End-of-the-Year Edition

By: | December 31, 2014

 

Earlier this year, I made the case for tracking outcomes. As we enter 2015, now is a natural time to reflect on the year that was. As I do every December, I’ve spent some time this month evaluating my work performance, my accomplishments and my failures, and, as always, the process has led me to insights that I would have otherwise missed. Here, I argue that everyone can benefit from tracking outcomes, and I explain why sometimes we resist.Doctor2

Earlier this year, I installed a little program on my computer that tracks how I spend my time. At the end of the day, it can tell me how many minutes I spent editing a specific document, how long it took me to write a blog post and how much time I spent surfing the internet or checking email. The time tracker is part of my ongoing experiment on how to better manage my time. I’d been playing around with different tools for a while when it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know where all my time was going. So I started collecting data.

The results were enlightening. I was certain that social media and LOL cats were hogging too much time, but after tracking my numbers for a little while, I discovered that those diversions were just little blips. The data showed me that email was my actual number one time suck. I’d had no idea it was so bad, probably because internet surfing feels like guilty pleasure, while email feels like work.

Simply identifying the problem represented a huge step toward fixing it. Within a week, I had doubled my productivity score and cut in half the amount of time I was wasting on email. I didn’t take any drastic measures. I added a couple new filters to improve my email triage, but mostly I just paid attention. With the little timer window watching me, I automatically became more mindful of my habits.

I’ll never be one of those people who tracks every step and quantifies every possible aspect of their lives, but I’ve become a believer in tracking how I’m doing in areas I’d like to improve. Yes, tracking outcomes is often tedious, but it’s worth doing, because it turns out that we’re not very good at judging our performance. Most people think they’re above average, and this is true across disciplines. For instance, a 2006 study published in JAMA found that, “physicians have a limited ability to accurately self-assess,” and a 2012 study found that doctors overestimate the value of the care they provide.  Continue reading →

Holiday Redux: A Bookseller And His Well

By: | December 30, 2014

 LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in March 2014.

SteveIn the May issue of the Rotarian Magazine next month you will be able to read the full version of a story I did last year on toxic mine runoff in highland Bolivia. It’s a nice story of a tiny valley high in the mountains and the quixotic efforts to clean its water for the people living downstream. It’s got the usual cast – dedicated scientists, NGOs, recalcitrant mine owners.

But there is one tale I found during my reporting that didn’t make it into the story. It’s a tale of Francis “Steve” Stephenson, who owned a small bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the hundreds of lives he saved. The story starts with Steve’s son, David, a Methodist minister who’s worked on water projects in Bolivia for more than three decades. Back in 1989, he was planning a trip to visit towns outside of La Paz that were struggling to find stable sources of clean water.

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Holiday Redux: The Ceremonial Stone

By: | December 29, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in slightly different form in July 2014.

Sarah's face

Sarah dipped her fingers in a red mineral paint and lifted them to her face. She put streaks above her cheekbones and up her chin, her design standing out against a backdrop of ice and barren, snowbound mountains. We were on the surface of the Harding Icefield, one of the largest remaining ice masses in North America. Five of us had skied a camp out onto the 700-square-mile face of this icefield and were now going primal.

She held out her palm full of pigment and painted brown-red stride-marks across my wind-dried face. Then she turned to our buddy Q, a filmmaker who was following us out here, and painted his face as well.

The pigment she used, coloring across our cheeks and down the bridges of our noses, was powdered red ochre mixed in the palm of her hand with water. It was something I always carried around in my pack, and every few years there’d be a day so perfect, so beautiful, I’d break it out. We’d just climbed a series of nunataks, mountain summits sticking up through the ice, and as a celebration, I got out the ochre. Continue reading →

The Last Word, Dec 22-26

By: | December 27, 2014

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The People of LWON began a brief period of holiday rest by telling you what TV shows and movies you might binge-watch on your winter break, from the TV spinoff of a series of comic book movies to Scandinavian drama. A lot of Scandinavian drama.

What do you like to read during the dark winter nights? Post-apocalyptic fiction? Historical thrillers? Perhaps you would like to revisit some classic mysteries? The People of LWON recommend books of the present, past, and future.

For Christmas Eve, I shared a post from the LWON vaults about a folklorist’s research on the pub-based carol-singing tradition in the north of England. The tuning is broad and the community spirit is warmer than the beer.

Perhaps those books we recommended should come with a warning: may cause anxiety, irritability, and intense cravings. Jessa has a problem, and the problem is books.

Those squiggly dots and marks and lines don’t just bring meaning to sentences. They save lives. Roberta explains, with heavy use of the dash–her favorite form of punctuation.

Image: Shutterstock

Holiday Redux: The Beauty of Punctuation

By: | December 26, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in November 2013.

Comma butterfly

Several years ago, I splurged on a gorgeous red hardcover edition of Strunk and White’s classic book on writing, The Elements of Style. Illustrated by Maira Kalman, the pages are filled with fanciful depictions of punctuation and grammar rules. To demonstrate the use of the apostrophe in the phrase “Somebody else’s umbrella,” Kalman drew a pensive lady dressed in yellow gazing up at a pink umbrella (with, appropriately enough, an apostrophe-shaped handle). For the dash—my favourite form of punctuation—the illustration shows a towzled man in striped pajamas, accompanied by the caption “His first thought on getting out of bed—if he had any thought at all—was to get back in again.”

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The Question Mark butterfly.

Recently, I came across another form of punctuation art: The curious markings on butterflies. Some species in the genus Polygonia sport a comma on the underside of their wing. Another species, called the Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis), displays a quizzical crescent and dot. And enthusiasts have spotted other punctuation marks; one posted a snapshot taken in Spain with the question “First ever sighting of the semi-colon butterfly?”, and another photographer captured what appeared to be a colon on a butterfly in Staffordshire, England.* Continue reading →

Holiday Redux: I Can’t Put It Down

By: | December 25, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in July 2012.

Alarmist reporting about addictions to sex, to the internet or to exercise can suggest that new syndromes are being invented every day, that human existence is pathologized out of proportion. But some compulsive behaviors that caused concern centuries ago continue to affect people today, and the sufferers have trouble getting anyone to take their problems seriously.

Men and women book readers, who get up in the morning and go to bed in the evening with a book in their hand, who sit down at the table with it, who put it next to them at work, carry it with them on walks, and who cannot separate themselves from it, until they have finished reading it. But they have hardly devoured the last page of a book, they are already greedily eyeing up, where they might get the next one from […] and devour it with a voracious appetite. No smoker, coffee-friend, wine-drinker, gambler could be so addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee table than many a book-hungry reader is to his reading.

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Holiday Redux: The Hidden Carols of England

By: | December 24, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in January 2014, and I thought it would be nice to give it another outing during the holidays.

While Shepherds Watched

People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of years. They sing week after week and year after year. Each pub has a season; in one, Christmas carols start on November 11 and continue until the first Sunday after Christmas. Every Sunday afternoon, people pack into a pub and sing together.

On Tuesday folklorist Ian Russell gave a lecture at the Library of Congress about his work on what he calls the “hidden” carols of northern England, particularly those Sheffield pubs. Russell is the director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He’s been studying folk traditions in South Yorkshire—which includes Sheffield—and North Derbyshire for 40 years.

A pub carol sing isn’t a religious occasion. It’s secular caroling. There’s beer. Sure, they sing about the Messiah’s birth and Mary and so on, but the point of being there, Russell says, is the community. People go out of a sense of commitment to the group and to the tradition. You do it every year because you do it every year.

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