Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Christopher B. Daly 

A hat-tip to TNR for recognizing the impact of High Times, the magazine that has stayed laser-focused on its advocacy of legalizing marijuana use in the United States.  (Memo to TNR: in your drive to be resolutely counter-intuitive about everything, you overuse superlatives. High Times is obviously influential to anyone who stops to think about it for a second. You don’t need a headline saying it “may be the most influential.”)

Based in New York, High Times was founded in 1974 by Tom Forcade.

From Wikipedia:

The magazine was founded in 1974 by Tom Forçade of the Underground Press Syndicate.^[1] High Times was originally meant to be a joke, a single issue lampoon of Playboy, substituting dope for

First edition

sex. But the magazine found an audience, and in November 2009, celebrated its 35th anniversary.^[2] Like Playboy each issue contains a centerfold photo, but instead of a nude woman, High Times typically features a choice grade of cannabis plant.

The magazine soon became a monthly with a growing circulation audited by ABC reaching 500,000 copies an issue; rivaling Rolling Stone and National Lampoon. The staff quickly grew to 40 people. In addition to high-quality photography, High Times featured cutting-edge journalism covering a wide range of topics including politics, activism, drugs, sex, music and film.

High Times has long been influential in the marijuana-using counterculture. Past contributors include Charles Bukowski,William S. Burroughs, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Andy Warhol.

As I have written elsewhere, this approach to journalism puts High Times squarely in a long, glorious tradition in American journalism: the advocacy tradition.

From Sam Adams to Tom Paine. . .

. . . from William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass

. . . From Ida B. Wells to Ida Tarbell

. . . from Jacob Riis to Lewis Hine

. . . from Upton Sinclair to Lincoln Steffens

. . . from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gloria Emerson

. . . from Jann Wenner to Hunter Thompson

. . . from Westbrook Pegler to Sean Hannity

. . . from the Hearstpress to the Lucepress

. . . from Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden

They’re advocates all!

By Christopher B. Daly 

I admit to being a little puzzled about recent stories concerning Bloomberg’s coverage of China. I think the NYTimes is trying to tell us something but is constrained by journalistic conventions. Reading between the lines, here’s what I think the Times is trying to say:

A reporter for Bloomberg named Michael Forsythe wrote a terrific article exposing how the powerful in China become rich. His editors, including editor in chief Matthew Winkler, got cold feet out the fear that the article would anger the powerful in China, who would retaliate against Bloomberg by refusing to buy any more of Bloomberg’s profitable capital-tracking machines (and maybe by blocking Bloomberg content from reaching the huge Chinese market). So, the squelched the article, which has yet to appear. 

Now the other shoes are starting to drop:

–The reporter was “suspended” (whatever that means).

–Last week, veteran journalist and stand-up editor Amanda Bennett (whom I knew in college, and she was a tough cookie back then) announced that she was leaving Bloomberg.

I suspect that Bloomberg top execs are opting for short-term gain over long-term investment. When the NYTimes ran a similar expose about China’s “Princelings,” the Times news report was banned in China — although the Times‘ correspondents were not kicked out of the country. That means that, for now, Times ads are not seen by a huge potential audience. But that’s just a temporary hit. In the longer run, the Times has established itself as a truly independent news operation, and I know that the rising generation of Chinese journalists admire the Times. Ultimately, I think the Times will come out on top and will be flourishing in China long after Bloomberg terminals are tossed onto the dustbin of history.

If you have figured this all out, please leave a comment.

By Christopher B. Daly

Thanks to fog-cutter Michael Kinsley, who always manages to write in a way that is fresh, direct, and to-the-point. His latest: a review in the Sunday NYTBR dissecting the reporting, thinking, and writing in “Double Down,” the latest presidential campaign account by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The review includes this wonderful paragraph, which captures a lot about the perils of “straight” political reporting:

Thanks, Mike.

By Christopher B. Daly

A hat-tip to the worthwhile History News Network, an online resource for historians based at George Mason University, for compiling a considerable amount of recent commentary and analysis by historians about John F. Kennedy. The topics range from his presidency to his assassination and elsewhere.

If you like, your should subscribe to HNN. You will learn something every week.  You will also be supporting the fine work of HNN’s sponsor, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. 

By Christopher B. Daly 

A hat-tip to The New Republic for this piece about how to visualize our current political alignments. (And a double hat-tip to UMichigan researcher Mark Newman who thought this up.) The key to understanding this view of politics is a device known as a “cartogram” — which is a map that depicts geography according to some criterion other than space. So, if you map the United States based on the density of population, then the big empty spaces don’t register very much.

To dramatize:

Here’s a conventional map showing the United States in terms of counties, with red depicting counties that are majority Republican and blue depicting ones that are majority Democratic. It’s a gorgeous map but very misleading, because it creates the impression that the U.S. is basically a “red” country with some pockets of “blue.” If I were a Republican, this is the kind of map that would encourage me to think about taking “my” country “back.”

But, of course, that’s not the whole story. In fact, the country has a narrow Democratic majority. But how to depict that?

This cartogram is one way:

In the cartogram, units of space are resized to reflect the population of each county and the margin of victory in the last presidential election. This view makes the U.S. look like a bluish/purplish country with some red swirls mixed in. Very different visual impact.

Here is a link to Newman’s software, so you can make your own cartograms!

For a different view of U.S. politics, consider this cartogram by the NYTimes. It makes me want to move to North Dakota or Wyoming — almost.

This map shows each state re-sized in proportion to the relative influence of the individual voters who live there. The numbers indicate the total delegates to the Electoral College from each state, and how many eligible voters a single delegate from each state represents.

A quick update to yesterday’s post about Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book:

Here is today’s review in the NYTimes, which gave it a respectful endorsement (and helpfully points out that the book is a monster at more than 900 pages!).

Here is a link to a good diagnosis of what’s wrong with a lot of news coverage of the U.S. government shutdown. The default position is “a pox on both your houses.” But what if one house is to blame?

Here’s an update from TPM.

By Christopher B. Daly

Among the unfortunate effects of shutting down the U.S. government is the impact on the “non-essential” workers who run the National Archives, the presidential libraries, the Library of Congress, and other repositories of our national memory. That, in turn, means that a lot of historians, history grad students, writers, and others are sidelined until this blows over.

Even the incomparable Library of Congress digital collections are off-limits. So, a nation that is busy doing a dumb thing is going to start getting dumber.

Here is an article from History News Network detailing some of the disruptions.

And for journalists as well as historians, here’s another downside: the normally glacial processing of Freedom of Information requests has now ground to a halt. No more FOIA disclosures until Congress get back to funding the government.

Sheesh.