The always-controversial cartoonist, reporter, and author Ted Rall wants to go back to Afghanistan. After covering the U.S. invasion in 2001 for the Village Voice and KFI Radio, Rall wrote the books To Afghanistan and Back and Silk Road to Ruin. Now, Rall wants to return to Afghanistan to cover the voices of the Afghan people in a style he compares to Joe Sacco’s cartoon-reporting. This time, he wants his readers, rather than major media outlets, to pay it.

To fund his trip, Rall started a Kickstarter project, asking fans help cover his expenses with contributions of $10 or more. In a podcast interview with Kickstarter board member Andy Baio, Rall talks about why independent projects like his so necessary. Most reporters in Afghanistan, according to Rall, “have too much money, and they get parachuted into a place that they don’t know anything about. But also, they’re idiots.”

Source: Waxy 

“The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law,” wrote Duke University professor of law James Boyle in 2008. “The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.”

These words make up the preamble to The Public Domain Manifesto, the collaborative work of scholars, activists, and other citizens concerned about the international trend towards increasingly strict and punitive copyright laws. Initial signers of the manifesto include organizations like Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

More from the manifesto:

The Public Domain as aspired to in this Manifesto is defined as cultural material that can be used without restriction, absent copyright protection. In addition to works that are formally in the public domain, there are also lots of valuable works that individuals have voluntarily shared under generous terms creating a privately constructed commons that functions in many ways like the public domain. Moreover, individuals can also make use of many protected works through exceptions and limitations to copyright, fair use and fair dealing. All of these sources that allow for increased access to our  culture and heritage are important and all need to be actively maintained in order for society to reap the full benefit of our shared knowledge and culture.

Read the entire manifesto and, if you are so moved, sign it at publicdomainmanifesto.com.

In the latest issue of Prospect, Open University's Nigel Warburton looks at recent censorship scandals in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Ireland and writes, "perhaps it's not just cheap clothes that we'll be importing from China this year." From there he launches into a (very) short history of Western philosophers who argued against free expression:

Plato wanted to censor the arts because, he argued, they misrepresented the nature of reality, something that only philosopher-kings could accurately discern. Two millennia later, in 1965, the Marxist Herbert Marcuse also railed against free expression, asserting that it was of little use when the people in a capitalist democracy were so indoctrinated that they parroted their master's thoughts.

Source: Prospect 

The lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurring and giving rise to a new form “that we might call ‘true fiction,’” writes Alissa Quart in Columbia Journalism Review. Quart sees examples of this phenomenon all around, including Dave Eggers’ brilliant book What Is the What, which tells but also takes a few liberties with the tale of a Sudanese “Lost Boy”; the forthcoming graphic novel A.D. by Josh Neufeld, which depicts post-Katrina New Orleans; and even The Hurt Locker, the war film that is presented as fiction but is based on an original nonfiction magazine article.

Quart is quick to acknowledge that the fiction-nonfiction hybrid isn’t all that new, but she contends that writers well known for mixing the two, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, “imagined their work to be a certain kind of journalism.” Members of the newer breed, she notes, “seem to be backing away from categorizing things as ‘true,’ even as they are also rethinking what nonfiction is and can be.”

The new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, Quart writes, even makes the case “that some works long considered fiction are actually closer to this hybrid form,” and she quotes from a piece by the anthology’s editor, John D’Agata: “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Coincidentally, it was a recent story by D’Agata in The Believer that left me confused about what was information and what was art. In “What Happens There,” D’Agata traces the final moments of Levi Presley, a 16-year-old who killed himself by jumping from the top of the 1,149-foot-high Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The writer does several things at once: In the guise of a reporter, he attempts to penetrate the wall of silence surrounding suicide in Las Vegas, which has the highest suicide rate in the nation year after year. Wearing a memoirist’s hat, he interweaves his own experiences in the city, where he briefly lived to care for his mother. And as a facile prose stylist, he attempts to vividly convey the sights, sounds, and smells that Presley might have encountered as he walked toward his deadly jump through the sprawling casino complex.

I was immediately drawn in by D’Agata’s deft, artful writing, and yet as the tale unfolded I was stopped cold at several junctures, mostly because as a journalist I had certain expectations about what I perceived as, first and foremost, a piece of journalism. To wit:

• The story begins with the glaringly vague time reference “one summer,” yet anyone with Google at his fingertips can learn that Presley committed suicide in 2002. Why not place the story’s main event in time for the reader? When is one of the six key story components in classic news journalism—components that are, ironically, the organizing principle of D’Agata’s new book About a Mountain, which includes the suicide tale.

• After meeting with Presley’s parents to discuss their son’s death, he writes, “At some point, it came clear while I was visiting the Presleys that in fact I had not spoken to their son the night he died.” I first read this as a jarringly understated admission, delivered almost as an aside, that he had misrepresented himself to the parents in order to meet with them. Ethical red flags were flying all over the place before I figured out elsewhere—via his book’s jacket notes—that D’Agata himself had believed he might have spoken with Presley on that fateful night. Maybe fans of the new “true fiction” will read right past this, but for me this was a major stumbling block.

• D’Agata pays a private investigator $400 for “vital information” about Presley that he’s unable to ferret out himself, and rather than praising the investigator’s ability to dig up these details, he feels compelled to coyly note that she “had a smoker’s voice, a barking dog and screaming kids and Jeopardy on in the background” when he called her. Yeah, and she probably was overweight and wearing ridiculous slippers and sucking on a Bud Lite. D’Agata clearly has a keen eye for detail, but extending it to someone who’s basically helping him report the story, with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge dose of classist disapproval, gave me a shudder of discomfort.

• D’Agata is able to get only one local official to go on the record about the suicide, county coroner Ron Flud. The coroner seems like a pretty straight-up guy—“a finder of facts,” he calls himself—who invites D’Agata into his office and expounds insightfully on the taboo of talking about suicide. But apparently this still isn’t enough for D’Agata. He calls Flud out for not answering a question about whether a suicide jumper is likely to lose consciousness in a fall, then proceeds to relay, in a self-serving writerly flourish, several things that Flud did not say.

• Someone who knew Presley hangs up on D’Agata when he asks personal questions about the deceased. But we don’t know who because the writer doesn’t tell us. The conversation is transmitted as a terse, paraphrased exchange with no context or explanation. Literary, yes, but mystifying.

• Finally, D’Agata appears to have never visited the suicide victim’s memorial website, which has been online since 2005. Here he could have gleaned several intimate details about Levi Presley—details not mentioned in the article—from reminiscences written by friends and family, and he could have learned the names of several sources to pursue for his allegedly hard-to-find interviews. He also would have learned from the entry by “Mom” that Presley’s mother called him her “precious Boomer”—from “baby Boomer”—not “Booper,” as D’Agata writes.

In the end, the story seems to be a case in which a creative writer took on a semi-journalistic task, in the process taking liberties that some audiences may enjoy (James Wolcott of Vanity Fair certainly did, calling the story a “show stopper”) and that others may find confusing, distracting, or journalistically dubious.

If we are indeed entering a new world of hybrid literary journalism—one in which, Quart writes, “we are seeing nonfiction freed from its rigid constraints”—I for one hope we remember that some subjects, like a teenager’s suicide, seem to demand a deep and abiding respect for facts and clarity. At first impression D’Agata appears to be honoring the memory of Levi Presley by speaking the unspeakable—yet by the story’s end, at least to this reader, he appears to have done just the opposite.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, The Believer  (subscription required), Vanity Fair

Image by Marcin Wichary, licensed under Creative Commons.

An enchantingly quiet BBC World Service radio documentary equalizes seers and non-seers, as only audio can. Low vision and blind students at the Jyvskyl School in Finland make a soundscape out of their environment in order to navigate. Tones sound to indicate building entrances and exits, outdoor "echo boards" sound distinctly to the tap of a stick, and the surfaces of the hallways are decorated with textured (and noisy) murals. Hearing the Jyvskyl School for yourself relays a reality that neither video nor words offer.

Listen to the BBC World Service Radio Documentary, "The Sound of Snow and Ice."

(Thanks, New Statesman.)

Source:  BBC World Service

The Dead Magazine Club is an Utne Reader project, hosted by Tumblr. For more than 25 years, Utne Reader has been reprinting the best of the independent press. Many wonderful magazines and journals have come and gone since we launched as a newsletter in 1984, and we have a special place in our library reserved for magazines that are no longer.

We thought there ought to be a place to remember these publications. It’s our hope that the people who made these magazines and the people who loved them will share their memories in the comments. The club has only one rule: no internet research. As far as we’re concerned, all we know about these publications is what we can glean from the one or two issues in our library. Everything else we want to hear first hand.

There is so much we want to know! How did the magazine start? Why did it end? Was it run out of an office or a basement? Best moments. Worst moments. You get the idea.

Join us at The Dead Magazine Club and help us gather the hidden histories of the independent press! Or just browse some amazing covers.

Welcome to Kenya, where informed citizens still buy—and read—daily newspapers. Karen Rothmyer, a journalism professor at the University of Nairobi, chronicles Kenyans’ “seemingly unquenchable passion for print” in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

“Each newspaper in Kenya is typically read by fourteen people, and those who can’t afford to buy a paper sometimes ‘rent’ one,” Rothmyer writes. “My neighborhood news vendor charges the equivalent of thirteen cents for thirty minutes with one of the major dailies, all of which are in English. That compares with fifty cents to buy one, a significant sum even to office workers earning $20 a day, and out of reach for the far more numerous casual workers who generally earn no more than $2.”

Rothmyer admits that limited Internet access is a factor in the enduring popularity of print newspapers, but there are also cultural factors at play:

Patrick Quarcoo, a successful Ghanaian entrepreneur who started a new Kenyan newspaper, the Star, in 2007—yes, you read that right, a new daily newspaper—says it was his grandmother who taught him about the significance of print in an African context. “She had no real formal education, but she always used to say in Pidgin English ‘Book no lies,’” he recalls. “She completely believed in the power of print to shape our destiny.”

That belief continues to be widespread today all over the continent. “People want to see it to believe it,” says Joe Otin, the media research and monitoring director at the Kenyan affiliate of Synovate, a media research and watchdog firm.

Additionally, politics in Kenya is “all-consuming,” a prominent print advertiser tells Rothmyer, a nationwide passion that fuels the demand for newspapers. (She sees this firsthand when she travels to the small, rural town of Busia, where a group of citizens meets regularly to read and discuss recent papers.)

“Newspapers will not die here, definitely not,” says Daniel Kasajja Orubia, a twenty-eight-year-old manager who is among the small number of Kenyans who own a mobile phone with Internet access. He says he regularly uses it to check the BBC or other sites, but, he insists, “I’ll still be reading newspapers in twenty years.”

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Image by ShironekoEuro, licensed under Creative Commons.

“Information wants to be free!” It’s a mantra closely associated with copyright activists—or “copyfighters”—who rail against entities that seek to quash human creativity with copyright laws. Copyfighter Cory Doctorow insists the movement claims no ownership over the argument and very publicly distanced himself from it in a back-and-forth on Twitter today. Reading his Tweets on the subject is a little bit like listening to one side of a phone argument, but select just a few and you have a sucinct micro-essay on the impotence of “information wants to be free” as an argument to support dismantling copyright law:

“Information wants 2B free” is no more the rallying cry of free culture than “Kill whitey” is the basis of civil rights movement…

 “Information wants to be free” is lazy, stupid shorthand for a complex and nuanced discussion that can be readily found…

 Example: Copyfighters don’t want open gov-data because “info wants to be free.” They want it because they paid for it with tax…

Copyfighters don’t want the right to excerpt and quote b/c info wants to be free – it’s b/c this is the basis of all discourse …

Copyfighters don’t want the right to build on earlier works b/c “info wants to be free”—it’s b/c that's how all creativity starts…

Source: @doctorow 

The nominees for the 2010 Oscars were recently announced, and DVD pirates have already managed to release most of the films to the web. In an annual analysis of how many Oscar-nominated films are illegally available on the internet, Andy Baio of Waxy found that piracy was not as rampant as it has been in years past. With a month remaining before the awards ceremony, fewer screeners and DVD-quality files have been leaked, and camcorder and telesync releases have dropped, too. Baio doesn’t offer a definitive answer to why piracy is dropping, but will continue to update his analysis as more of the films are leaked.

Source: Waxy 

Image by DeusXFlorida, licensed under Creative Commons.

From Cute Yummy Time to Advances in Potato Chemistry and Technology, 2009 was a great year for odd book titles. The Bookseller pays homage to many of these strange, quirky, or off-color titles in its annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year award. The magazine recently released its “Very Longlist” of 49 of the strangest book titles of 2009, including Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich, Is the Rectum a Grave?, Peek-a-Poo: What's in Your Diaper?, and Venus Does Adonis While Apollo Shags a Tree.

(Thanks to nominee, The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin.)

Source: The Bookseller