The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, western Massachusetts, has mounted a comprehensive exhibit of the nudes of impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It’s impossible to see these paintings and sculptures in a public setting without some complicated feelings. I’ve never visited an impressionist art exhibit with a content warning before. I visited The Clark this weekend. (If…
If you were taking wagers on what I’d write about in this space, sincere praise for a letter from a Baptist minister would seem a very poor bet. Here’s what happened: President Trump got upset with Jonathan Karl of ABC News for reporting on the President’s claim that Alabama was in the path of a…
Mother Jones is posing the ultimate question for a publication: What words should you capitalize in a headline? I certainly know where I stand. There are four methods to decide which words get capitalized in headings: Sentence case: Capitalize only the first word, like a sentence. This is now the standard at the Washington Post,…
I have two simple questions for you. Is Elizabeth Warren the most likely democratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination? Is Elizabeth Warren more likely than not to win the Democratic nomination? One way to analyze these questions is to look at the odds on a site like PredictIt. As I write this, you can…
How do you justify evil? According to the AP and the Boston Globe, the Trump administration is ending a program that allowed families to stay in the United States while their children receive medical treatment for illnesses like cancer. (Boston is a center for specialized hospitals for children and cancer treatment so it deals with…
According to Monday’s Monmouth University poll, there’s now a three-way tie in the Democratic presidential primary: Warren, Sanders, and Biden. This has been reported as a “surge.” In fact, it says more about polls and media than it does about Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden. The Monmouth University poll reports three front-runners: Elizabeth Warren 20%,…
Have you seen this girl? I bet you have. And she’s there to make you angry. This image is from an article from U.S. News. The photo, by Steve Senne of AP, is “an unidentified 15-year-old student at a high school in Cambridge, Mass.” There was no need to get a photo release, because without…
Korsha Wilson published an article in the Washington Post’s food section. Then the Post published a correction. The correction is 579 words long and includes 15 bullet points. It raises a few questions about who gets published and who checks facts in the publications you read. Wilson, a freelancer, contributed an article about black families…
In the wake of the shooting in Texas, Donald Trump has asked the nation to come together to condemn white supremacy and racism. Given his own past statements stirring up racial animosity, how are news media supposed to write about that? For context, he’s been telling women of color in Congress to “go back where…