Defying the illegitimate authority of his crypto-fascist homeowners’ association, a punk dad issues an uncompromising manifesto.

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A couple of Miami Beach buddies score some good weed—and some international arms contracts.

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A diet change, instead of Ritalin, might be just the prescription for many ADHD cases.

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Glimpse the elusive waterbirds of Manhattan.

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“[O]ne day, while screening some episodes of HBO’s The Wire, it hit me: [Charles] Dickens was back and his name is David Simon.” Bill Moyers interviews David Simon at Guernica.

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Tax-free online sales are taking their toll in Washington state, the home of Amazon.

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Visit the Los Angeles you’ll never know: a city devoid of cars.

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Who hasn’t celebrated a major victory by firing guns into the air, a la Yosemite Sam? Slateexamines what happens to the bullets after you’ve emptied your clip (and whether or not they can kill you).

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Rupert Murdoch acquires New Internationalist. (Make sure to check the date that this one was posted.)

Testifying before a Senate hearing on the “Future of Media,” David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire and a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, warned that “high end journalism is dying in America, and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.”

He begins his comments, broadcast today by Democracy Now, by saying that he doubts that neither newspaper publishers nor new media mavericks will agree with his overall analysis. He blasts the captains of the newspaper industry for having a martyr complex, and delivers a withering analysis of their short-sighted decision to cut newsroom budgets in the hopes the consumers wouldn’t notice—a move he equates with Detroit’s downfall in the Seventies. He also reminds proprietors of news-oriented websites that bloggers, tweeters, and citizen journalists can’t take the place of professional reporters, who, like firefighters and other civic servants, require training and institutional support—not to mention funding for investigations that never see the light of day.

His conclusion is that without an acknowledgement that content is king, there is no hope for the future of serious journalism, for profit or not.

Source: Democracy Now! 

Before creating The Wire, one of the greatest shows in the history of television, David Simon was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun. In a brief, over-lunch interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, Simon talks about the future of journalism and how newspapers can charge for content.

Some newspaper experts argue, “We already let the horse out of the barn door,” in giving content away for free, but Simon doesn’t buy that. He brings up the point that “television was free 30 years ago. Now everybody’s paying 16 bucks a month, 17 bucks a month, 70 dollars a month.” The key is getting a core group of writers that can’t be found anywhere else (like the HBO model). Either that, or sell porn.

You can watch the video below:

David Simon on charging for news and whether "The Wire" is journalism from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

(Thanks, Kottke.)

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab

This Sunday, HBO airs the first episode of Generation Kill, a darkly funny and hyper-realistic miniseries about American soldiers on the eve of the Iraq invasion. The show was produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the acclaimed creators of the police drama The Wire. For the latest UtneCast, I spoke with Susanna White, who directed four of the seven episodes of Generation Kill, about capturing the chaos and banality of the Iraq war and why being a British woman helped her depict testosterone-filled world of U.S. Marines.

To subscribe to the UtneCast through iTunes, click here, or just listen to the interview below. 

 Interview with Generation Kill Director Susan White: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

And to watch a preview from Generation Kill, click on the YouTube video below.

As the smartest show ever to pop up on the fleeting ether of our televisions, The Wire has generated a lot of equally smart commentary. The series’ gritty, ultra-realistic, and blindingly multifaceted take on life in Baltimore almost demands that television writers bang out heaps of articles about it (especially as the fifth, final season begins to unfold).

Some of the best chatter about the show I’ve found comes from the group blog Heaven and Here. In entry after entry, the writers digest The Wire’s meaning and intent from so many different angles that the site acts as an indispensable guidebook to the tangled streets of the show. It’s fitting that this ponderous hub of thoughtful posts is the best way to understand a work as vast and sprawling as The Wire: How else to grasp the minutiae of five seasons’ worth of dense dialogue, interlocking story lines, and Greek tragedy than with a barrage of interlocking blog posts, each taking a different look at the same show?

But hold back on reading too much until you’ve watched the whole body of David Simon’s opus—you don’t want to spoil any endings.

—Brendan Mackie