Suitable primarily for working journalists and others concerned with support of a free press, this is a provocative...
Forget going to jail to protect your source—the government can simply identify her through metadata.
In 2013, Edward Snowden famously absconded with an enormous cache of files documenting mass data collection by the American National Security Agency and four allied governments; their publication by the Guardian and the Washington Post had wide-ranging consequences. Bell (Professional Practice and Digital Journalism/Columbia Journalism School) and Owen (Digital Media and Global Affairs/Univ. of British Columbia) present 20 essays by contributors with backgrounds in journalism, digital media, and law about the significance for journalists of the capabilities exposed by Snowden and resulting obstacles to reporting on politically sensitive issues. Among others, the contributors include Steve Coll, Clay Shirky, Glenn Greenwald, and Julia Angwin. The collection is not an in-depth analysis of a single problem but is more like a conference with brief workshops focusing on narrow but related topics. Most of the essays deal with some practical aspect of the relationship of a free press to a democratic government—i.e., under what circumstances should journalists be permitted to publish government secrets? What can a government do to prevent the exposure of secrets, and what can the press do to circumvent these actions? Other essays move beyond these core concerns to more tangential topics ranging from appropriate limits on control of passports—Snowden's was revoked while he was in transit—to the control of news flow by unaccountable actors like Facebook. The essays' value lies more in the issues they raise than in any solutions they may offer. Several contributors argue that many news organizations are woefully ill-prepared to protect their work and the identities of confidential sources from official snooping, and they offer specific suggestions for improvement. Many others pose thoughtful questions and a framework for considering them but could by themselves be fruitful topics for an entire book.
Suitable primarily for working journalists and others concerned with support of a free press, this is a provocative compendium of issues confronting journalism as new technologies pose an array of threats to independent reporting.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-17613-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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