How Do I Respond to Radical "Populism" Which Exploits Social Angst
The rise of extremist is distressing. Good people, people I know have lost their way, are vacuumed into extremist. Why? It promises a relief valve to the angst of precarity which inflicts the working class and marginalized people in our society. The purity and simplicity of extreme ideologies…
Have You Not Driven in Snow Before?
I finally did it, I finally had a complete uncontrolled wipe-out on a Sobi Bike. The wipeout was entirely of my own fault and doing. It was a light steady snow today, the kind that makes roads slippery and covered in slush. There’s just enough snow on the…
Is It A Re-Gift if I Got Myself The Gift to Give Away?
Playing the Secret (not really secret) Santa game, I scanned the gift selection for something that I wanted to take home at the end of the final steals. I decided I wanted the cooking pans, but, I knew there was almost no chance I would get the pans.…
Jeff Jarvis on The Spiegel Scandal
A good take from Jeff Jarvis on the scandal at one of Germany’s flagship The Spiegel following the revelations that the news magazine’s top reporter, Claas Relotius, was a serial inventor of stories – a fraud. He was the CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014, “Earlier this…
On Forgetting People from High School
It’s happening more often, I’m encountering people I went to high school with, but no longer remember. It’s been over 15 years, and this should be expected. Nonetheless, each time it happens, I feel guilty about not remembering. We’re now at the stage in our lives where a…
It's Easier to Write About Others, Than It is Ourselves
My biography half-jokes that I write in “first person to ensure you can see my bias – I tend to like myself”. I wrote that in part to make light of my discomfort with writing about myself. A discomfort that I was reminded of the past few weeks…
The Crash of JoeyColeman.ca
Update your blog Joey, get back to the passion of blogging Joey! My internal voice tells me this numerous times each week. My poor orphaned blog, which crashed sometime in the past week or maybe month. Maybe if I were updating my blog, as I often say I…
The Daily Show Finds Its Strive, Or I Got Used to Change
During the past few months, I’ve really enjoyed The Daily Show again. TDS lost me in the transition from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah. Noah seemed (to me at least) too unsure of himself, too guarded in his jokes, the “correspondents” similarly did not appeal to me. Now,…
Podcasts and the Slow Democracy Movement
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create an informed local municipal-focused civic affairs discussion for years; it’s one of the primary goals of my journalism. Podcasting provides the opportunity to do so, and Lawrence Lessig conveys many of the ideas I’m considering on his blog: Podcasting…
Age Shall Not Wear Them, Nor The Years Condemn
These words carry greater meaning for me with each passing year; as I watch my friends who served and came back age, yet those who did not return remain frozen in time. I look back on photos of some of those friends who I was fortunate enough to…