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Review: The Private Eye by Vaughan, Martin, & Vicente

June 23, 2016 by krisis

Lately, I trust journalists less than ever before. Or, maybe I trust them, but I don’t trust the stories they’re telling.

Last week during the gun control filibuster on the Senate floor I compiled the names and demographic information from all the participating Senators, and my friend Lauren created an interactive infographic with the information. I did not read a single media story that named all of the participants after the fact.

I know this is a theme in conservative American politics right now – the bias of the mass media. I’m not talking about bias. I’m talking about facts.

The past few weeks have been full of big new stories nationally (Orlando and gun control) and locally (sugary drink tax and the DNC), and the biggest of those stories have been missing so many facts. They’re all headlines and quick hits. Hot takes with no depth. No quoting from primary sources. Lots of people coming away with incomplete ideas and parroting them as reality.

Those same weeks have also been full of truth. I become deeply invested in last week’s filibuster from the floor of the Senate and did not consume a single pundit’s take on it. I watched it live and was my own pundit. Yesterday’s sit-in in the House circumvented pundits even further – it couldn’t even be broadcast by networks because the House was out of session and cameras were off, so representatives broadcast it directly to the public via Periscope, cutting all all possible middlemen.

Of course, the next day journalism swept in – but, as a first-hand witness to the events in question, I found the subsequent coverage lacking. Where were the names of the participants, the lengths of time they spoke, the information they shared? I put more information together about the filibuster with data visualization from my friend Lauren than I saw from any news site!

I don’t trust journalists or I don’t trust the stories they tell, but I can hardly blame them. After all, I have a journalism degree and I never set foot into that field. I went CorpComm because I wanted job security and a standard of living, and that was before online outlets were effectively subsidizing their print editions and running on pay-per-click ad units. But I still believe journalism should represent unfiltered truth with a neutral point of view, unless it professes itself as opinion. I had a lot to say about the filibuster, but none of it made its way into the data.

What if journalists didn’t have to worry about the funding and the hits, and could focus on terrific journalism? There are some outlets today that fit the bill, and I don’t think it’s coincidence they produce some of the most thorough reporting. I know it’s hard to picture state-run journalism, because so often it’s journalists who expose the flaws in the state, but that’s one version of what I’m talking about. Instead of asking journalists to make personal sacrifices to do what they love and write for maximum eyeballs, imagine a minimum number of reporters guaranteed on each beat, with job security, fair pay, and a retirement plan.

Do you think the journalism would get better or worse? Does it take sacrifice to want to dig as deep as journalists dig? Or, would the skill and commitment increase?

The Private Eye

The Private Eye collects the 10 chapters of a complete web comic story by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente.

Tweet-sized Review: The Private Eye finds Vaughan & Martin a bit too clever for their own good; I liked the world better than the story

CK Says: Consider it.

The Private Eye is a much more interesting world than it is an interesting story – and, it’s a pretty decent story.

Private Eye is an Eisner and Harvey Award Winning comic story conceptualized by Brian K. Vaughan and created in collaboration with Marcos Martin and his wife, colorist Muntsa Vicente. It was initially released beginning in March 2013 as a web-only comic via Panel Syndicate, with its 10 chapters released across 24 months. Each chapter was available as a DRM-free as a pay-what-you-will download.

You can still purchase it that way, or you can opt for a gorgeous $50 hardcover version released in December that includes the complete Vaughan/Martin email chain conceptualizing the story and their method of release (complete with fretting over what to call the website and how to make a profit from it).

The story of Private Eye depicts an America where the press has taken over peacekeeping for the police thanks to a landmark omni-leak of every possible piece of data. The event, called “The Cloudburst,” exposed everyone’s online information to everyone else. It wasn’t the leaked account balances or private nudes that did everyone in, but the search histories. It turns out that was as close as you could come to knowing what was going on inside someone else’s head – their deepest fears and desires. A lot of those heads were pretty dark places. [Read more…] about Review: The Private Eye by Vaughan, Martin, & Vicente

how do you know what sore is?

June 22, 2016 by krisis

We saw a lot of beautiful animals at the Elmwood Park Zoo last week, but this was my favorite photo.

Hello! I am still a person under all of these tens of thousands of words of Marvel Comics content.

Or, at least, I think I am. It’s hard to tell, because my personhood is different than it was a few months ago.

We’re now in the eighth week of my stay-at-home parentage and life is definitely upside down from what I’m used to. I’ve done a lot of things that are totally uncharacteristic of me. I bake with EV regularly. (I hate baking.) We go grocery shopping multiple times a week (I prefer to order online.) We’ve visit the zoo every other week (I really hate zoos.) I go out for long walks and hangouts at the playground. (I wither in weather above 80) We tend to the violets in our front yard. (I think gardening is pointless.)

There’s even a rumor I might spend a day next week at the shore. (I despise beaches. And people. And that pesky heat, again.)

I’m not hating those things as we do them. Well, maybe the parts that are hot. My point is, all of those things would be miserable wastes of time to me if I wasn’t spending them with EV, but they all make her deliriously happy. So I do them.

I hope EV is having fun. I can’t tell. That’s the thing about toddlers – they’re very opinionated and they crave freedom, but they’re not really good at describing the state of their world subjectively. Last week EV took a big spill out of our rocking chair on the same day she did a ton of pull-ups on the monkey bars at the playground, and she seemed to be pretty sore all over the next day. We asked her, “Are you sore?” We got blank stares in return. EV doesn’t know what “sore” actually describes, and there’s no way to show her. We have to wait until she’s sore and squawks like a chicken about soreness, and then tell her, “That’s what it feels like to be sore.”

Despite that, usually when I ask her, “How’s it going?” she replies, “Good,” and keeps on fussing whatever she’s fussing at the moment while I explain the different between “good” and “well.”

EV supervising my copyediting earlier today.

I’m not sure how it’s going. Last month was more unbridled fun, but that was at least in part due to the weirdness of not going to work every day. Spending every day hanging out with a toddler is a pretty big shift after years of interacting with whip-smart coworkers daily and being under constant deadline pressure.

This month I’m a little more intent on getting some writing and planning done (love those deadlines) while EV is becoming more independent every day. Today was the first time I’ve been met with a chorus of “I can do that myself.” It’s thrilling, but also a little sad. I was just getting good at doing a lot of these things for her.

We won’t find a balance because she’ll keep changing. I get that. The best thing I can do is keeping challenging myself in different ways to keep my promise that staying at home doesn’t become a routine. That’s why I’m so happy to have shipped over 60,000 words of CK so far this month It was a massive undertaking, but I’m so happy I did it. I like to do big projects here at CK, whether that’s a song a day for a month (OMG, that was ten years ago), writing a book in one month, or intensely recapping and ranking a season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

The fun of it is that they’re always different. I don’t tend to enjoy doing the same challenge the same way a second time.

Luckily, being a full-time parent to a toddler is pretty similar in scope. It’s also like being a toddler. I’m not sure if I’m sore or worn out. I don’t know if it’s going well, and by the time I do “well” could be something totally different.

All I know is that I should probably start figuring out what I’m going to write tomorrow.

Do guns kill people? Actually, yes they do.

June 16, 2016 by krisis

I’ve never held a gun.

I used to want to shoot one. This was in the 90s, when The X-Files made it seem like a really good idea to be an FBI agent. That came with shooting guns, so I figured I had to get used to the idea. Since that never came to pass, neither did shooting a gun.

I’ve mentioned in passing that my father owns a gun store. He didn’t when I was a child, and despite it being about 15 years since I learned this fact I’ve seen him a finite amount of times in that period and fun gun facts have only come up in a few of them.

My father is a reasonable guy who is willing to have a conversation about just about anything. As someone in a super-liberal, gun-free bubble, his perspective can be enlightening. Our last chat was after the Sandy Hook shooting. Though he largely deals in antiques, he mentioned that gun sales and, especially, ammunition sales tend to spike after a shooting. He also talked about the realities of owning a gun shop, what background checks really meant for him, and how he sometimes decides not to sell a gun or ammo to a person.

Today I posted a now widely-shared Philly.com article titled “I bought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in Philly in 7 minutes” on Facebook – not to stir any debate, but because I found it to be compelling journalism. In reaction, a conversation with a college friend who is a farmer sprung up. It took him “about an hour” to buy a Ruger 10/22 in a different state. That gun is is semi-automatic – a feature he appreciates because he’s trying to keep foxes away from his quail and he’s not such a good shot at a distance.

(I love my friends.)

My point is that it’s easy to say “BAN ALL GUNS” when you’re someone who has never held one, needed one, or sold one. Screaming from within a bubble using data that agrees with you doesn’t change hearts and minds.

Screaming from within a different bubble where you say “GUNS ARE GREAT” without those same perspectives is just as ineffective.

Since there has been a lot of bubble-screaming this week, I decided the only real answer was data and I would only accept that data if it was from non-partisan or fact-checked sources had references to the primary sources of said data.

Because I’m still struggling over the definition of semi-automatic and I no longer have an amazing team of analysts to help me interpret statistics, I decided to go broader and simply try to understand our rate of gun deaths. [Read more…] about Do guns kill people? Actually, yes they do.

the room where it happened

June 14, 2016 by krisis

I sat in an uncomfortable wooden seat in Masterman’s cavernous auditorium. It was my first time attending the annual day of health awareness presented by our Peer Educators, which kicked off with a live program.

The theme that year was awareness of sexual assault. Between speeches, songs, or short plays, a single student would emerge from behind the curtain and stand alone in the spotlight. They stood there and shared a story of assault – not their own, but one solicited from friends or family. The stories were told in the first person, sometimes in the present tense – frank and unfiltered. They weren’t something you would expect to see on a high school stage, but absolutely something that ought to be there.

A portion of the program ended, bringing us to another punctuating monologue. A young man stepped out onto the stage. He had his hair in little twists and a flannel shirt around his waist, as was the style at time. And he just… talked. About being a kid, about joy and wonder, and about how his assault ended that.

It’s not my story to share or repeat, but I remember so many elements of that monologue to this day. Words, but pauses, too. The look on his face.

I was dumbstruck by it. Not because I was a survivor of assault. Not because a man was delivering the story rather than a woman. I was struck because of the piercing honesty of the words. There was no moment of latency between the actor and the performance. I knew they weren’t his own words, but he made it impossible to believe.

Sometime later the lights came up and students filtered out of auditorium to attend workshops on consent, healthy body image, and safe sex. My mind was still on the stage. As I watched my peers have open discussions about their experiences, questions, and fears, I had one thought fixed in my mind: I needed to become a Peer Educator. What they were doing was important. They were not only educating, but creating fundamental shifts in thinking.

2016-tony-awards-leslie-odom That young man was Leslie Odom, Jr, a frequent supporting player on TV and Aaron Burr in Broadway’s Hamilton. I went to middle school with him, but knew him from a distance only as the kid with the golden voice who sang at assemblies and was an 8th grader playing a lead in the high school play. I actually met him in Freshman year. I sat next to him in geometry; he read the lyrics to Lisa Loeb’s “Taffy” at a poetry slam.

I am sure that Leslie doesn’t recall me. He has no reason to. I don’t recall if we had a single conversation before he switched schools to pursue his creative pursuits. Honestly, I was always a little starstruck by him.

I recall that monologue, though. It was still playing in my head when I joined the Peer Education program during the next call for applications. I still think about it from time to time; I can still play it back.

I spend a lot of digital ink talking about how my BFF Gina made performance look easy and helped me discover my life as a performer, but I often overlook that I also went on to produce pair of those health awareness assemblies and facilitate those workshops. That was a massive part of my transformation and newfound self-confidence as a performer and occasional activist. I had never voluntarily been on a stage before. I became the one delivering the performances and monologues to the school. I’d never have Leslie’s control or gravitas, so I found my own way. I mocked convention. I mocked myself. I tried to make everyone think while they laughed.

On Sunday night, Leslie won a Tony Award. I would give him one myself, if I could, for that one monologue still seared into my brain and how it contributed to changing my life. I’ve now been a performer for more than half of it. I used to file into the auditorium as an audience member, but now I’m at home on stage. It’s how I met my wife. I’m a steadfast advocate for a sexual health and reproductive rights. I’m raising my daughter with the idea that she has autonomy over her body and that consent matters for everyone.

Leslie won a Tony Award and I cried before I even saw his acceptance speech.

Congratulations, Leslie. I am extraordinarily happy for you and I can never thank you enough.

actual facts about becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party

June 7, 2016 by krisis

US_states_by_the_delegates_Democratic_Party_2016

States by Democratic primary delegate count. Note that some territories with binding delegates have been omitted.

We need to talk about the Democratic nomination process.

Last night, the Associated Press and many other outlets made the call to announce that Hillary Clinton is the “presumptive nominee” for president by the Democrats.

This was bad, unethical journalism even though Clinton is in all likelihood going to become the presumptive nominee by next week. However, “going to become” and “is” are two different things. (More on that from Paste.)

At the same time, yesterday social media influencers (primarily Sanders supporters) released an image of “Real Math” that seems to disprove that anyone can become the presumptive nominee before the Democratic National Convention on July 25th. This image doesn’t include the context of factors affecting said math. It is intentionally misleading in an effort to rile up Sanders supporters and Clinton foes.

From my perspective, it seems that three things are presently objectively true, with a fourth that is subjectively true for me. I am summarizing them below not to change your mind, but to try to engage transparently and reasonably with the information that’s available to me right now. I urge you to look at whole picture, and not solely what any single biased source (me included) may or may not be reporting.

Here we go! [Read more…] about actual facts about becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party