Name them

It's interesting that the Times' Elaine Sciolino seems to think it's normal in her article about riots touched off by the deaths of two young French teens of African descent--As Violence Ebbs, Sarkozy Calls Riots Unacceptable--to not quote or even mention any French people of African descent.

She doesn't even give us the names of the boys who were killed, Moushin, 15, and Larami, 16.

We do get lots of quotes from, and mentions of, Sarkozy in his various guises (“Scum”, “Kärcher”, Boss, Sarko); lots of quotes from elderly non-African Frenchies who like him--but nothing from the population most affected by the deaths, and now the riots.

I think as long as French people of African and Arabic descent are literally unheard even when they take to the streets, they will keep taking to the streets.

And as long as reporters like Sciolino feel they can report a story like this without actually stepping foot in the non-white French world, Americans will have a hard time understanding anything beyond what Sarko thinks.

Love and travel

A couple of particularly interesting items from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today, via the daily email newsletter.

-It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup, born in Jefferson, Iowa (1901). He was a student at the University of Iowa when he conducted his first poll for the Daily Iowan, to find the prettiest girl on campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married.

-Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

Poem: "Ticket" by Charles O. Hartman, from Island. © Ahsahta Press, 2004.

Watercolor of Greek church by Rebecca McGoodwin after photo by Louise Robertson

Name game

There's a protypical well-done Times piece up by crack reporter Sam Roberts,
In Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses, that builds off some Census data.

I'm not sure why more newspapers haven't mastered this type of piece--just take new data, talk to some normal people and some experts, and produce a snapshot of a growing trend.

Some interesting excerpts from the piece:

Step aside Moore and Taylor. Welcome Garcia and Rodriguez.

Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau. But for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez nearly edged out Wilson for 10th place. ...

Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place. The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6. ...

Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.” ...

The latest surname count also signaled the growing number of Asians in America. The surname Lee ranked No. 22, with the number of Lees about equally divided between whites and Asians. Lee is a familiar name in China and Korea and in all its variations is described as the most common surname in the world.

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person. ...

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

I wonder how many Garcias and Rodriguezes it'll take to prevent the Times from calling stories like this a 'dilemma': Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby:

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

Lost in non-translation

The Post has a slightly misleading piece up, Looking to Adopt A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Surging.

Told through the story of an interesting student at Maryland who literally stumbled into studying Persian, the numbers, Susan Kinzie reports, are:

Interest in non-European languages, traditionally less commonly taught in the United States, has been surging, according to survey results released yesterday by the Modern Language Association.

More college students across the country are enrolling in language classes, and that is particularly true for Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Chinese language classes jumped 51 percent from 2002 to 2006 to nearly 52,000, and Korean grew 37 percent to more than 7,000. Arabic classes increased more than 126 percent to nearly 24,000.

And enrollments in Persian language classes nearly doubled nationally, although the total numbers, around 2,300, are still tiny, especially compared to popular languages such as Spanish.

Oddly, the article doesn't list the comparable numbers. Off the MLA website, we find:

The study of the most popular languages--Spanish, French, and German--continues to grow and represents more than 70% of language enrollments.

Inside, in the press release, we find the full list, with numbers of students enrolled/% of all enrollments/increase since 2002:

1) Spanish 822,985 52.2% + 10.3%

2) French 206,426 13.1% + 2.2%

3) German 94,264 6.0% + 3.5%

4) American Sign Language 78,829 5.0% + 29.7%

5) Italian 78,368 5.0% + 22.6%

6) Japanese 66,605 4.2% + 27.5%

7) Chinese 51,582 3.3% + 51.0%

8) Latin 32,191 2.0% + 7.9%

9) Russian 24,845 1.6% + 3.9%

10) Arabic 23,974 1.5% +126.5%

11) Ancient Greek 22,849 1.4% + 12.1%

12) Biblical Hebrew 14,140 0.9% - 0.3%

13) Portuguese 10,267 0.7% + 22.4%

14) Modern Hebrew 9,612 0.6% + 11.5%

15) Korean 7,145 0.5% + 37.1%

Hmm, "surging?" Heck, you could just as easily have written a piece about ASL, Italian, and Portuguese....

The headline's particularly egregious, since it presumes the traditional European trio of Spanish/French/German aren't 'foreign' the way these Asian and Middle Eastern tongues are.

In addition--when you start with such a small base, you'd think it'd be pretty critical to show the other languages for comparison so readers can understand how underwhelming the numbers overall are. And to note similar spikes were seen in other languages that can't be explained by geopolitics.

Maybe all that happened is we're in the middle of a surge in college enrollment, so with more kids around, more of them are taking pretty much all languages.

Or, since we know smaller schools can experience a spike in applications through such random things as one of their sports teams doing particularly well in football/basketball, or through placement on a big TV show/movie, maybe kids walking past TVs are just hearing these countries more, making them seem more relateable.

Really, I think the article should've been: Tripping Over A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Lags Far Behind Where Reason Would Place It, Experts Probe Impact of Media Portrayal of Non-European Countries As 'FOREIGN'

Ginormous

Every so often you read an article that makes you go 'wow!' Here's the Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen, Yikes! Yao vs. Yi is huge:

Tonight will bring the first NBA meeting of Yao and the player expected to be the next Chinese NBA star, Yi Jianlian, an occasion that could draw the largest global audience to see an NBA game. ...

"Here we have two gentlemen, from different regions, Shanghai (Yao) and the Guandong Province (Yi), and who mean so much to this enormous country, with an enormous television market and enormous love for basketball," [NBA Commissioner David] Stern said. "Now we have the exclamation point."

The game will be on 19 networks in China, including CCTV-5, Guangdong TV, Guangzhou TV, and ESPN Star Sports in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also will be available live through two Webcasters.

Though ratings estimates in China are difficult and vary widely, today's game is said to be certain to draw 150 million viewers and could reach 250 million. CCTV-5 alone is available in 210 million households.

Yao's first game against Shaquille O'Neal in 2002 drew an estimated audience of 220 million and the largest cable television ratings in the United States for a regular-season game since the 1995 comeback of Magic Johnson.

"I heard there were close to 200 million people that watched," Yao said. "But come on, in our country, we have (1.3) billion. That's still a small part of it." ...

When the Indianapolis Colts played the New England Patriots last Sunday, the average audience during the game was 33.8 million; 66.4 million saw at least a six-minute portion.

The average audience for Super Bowl XLI was 93 million, with 139.8 million seeing at least six minutes. There have been estimates Super Bowls draw a global audience of roughly 150 million.

The audience for tonight's Rockets game, starting on a Saturday morning in China, could exceed the Super Bowl, Colts-Patriots game and the Friday ESPN NBA games combined.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Michael Hunt weighs in as well, Young star puts Bucks on global market:

Almost as many people in a faraway land will watch an NBA game as the number of number of people who exist in the country that invented basketball. Such a staggering notion probably wasn't on Dr. Naismith's mind as he drove home that final nail in the peach basket.

Here's another thing to consider: It wasn't that long ago when the Bucks were happy to get a couple of people in outer Waukesha County to watch them play. To think that someone in Inner Mongolia is going to know that our little team even exists seems almost as implausible as Jake Voskuhl dunking on Yao.

That was one of the reasons the Bucks took Yi with the sixth pick in the draft. The most important reason, the one that is making the Bucks look smarter every day, is that Yi is going to be a tremendous player in this league. You can tell after four games, but more on that in a moment.

"I think there were 100 million (Chinese viewers) for our Bulls game," Bucks coach Larry Krystkowiak said. "As long as they're not in my ear yelling at me, it makes it pretty easy.

"It's exciting for us. It's one of the elements of being involved in this. It raises the level of awareness in a lot of ways. I think our guys know they're being watched a little bit closer and it doesn't hurt our effort at all. It creates more of a sense of urgency and accountability for all of us."

Krystkowiak's quote points to the ultimate effect China whill have on all of 'us'--they're so big that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, Americans are becoming aware that there's another country looming behind us.

We're no longer autarchists, competing against the best in each other--we're back in a race again, with a very different opponent; one in which we have a huge lead, but where the other competitor can't help but gain.

How we handle this--whether we use China as a worthy competitor pushing us to our best, whether we turn surly, whether we ignore reality, whether we lose sight of why we're running--will determine whether the 21st century ends with Americans still free to play our own game under our rules, or just another runner jockeying for oxygen.

Although you wonder with numbers like that, how long until the NBA buys into a Chinese network and starts scheduling Rockets and Bucks game for 9 a.m. EST?

AP photo of Yao and Yi by Darko Vojinovic via MSNBC

Feeding thyself

There's something about Free Rice that bothers me.

The site consists of a vocabulary game; it says for each word whose synonym you get right, "we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger".

It launched on October 7 with 830 grains of rice donated; so far today, 77,126,310 grains of rice have been donated.

Aside from the odd food aid is bad for Africa line of debate (see UN food aid 'causing chaos and violence' in Somalia for example) there's something distasteful about saying to a mostly-Western audience hey, play this game if you're bored at work--and if you do well, fewer kids in Africa will starve.

The site feeds into the whole Africa as playground for the West mentality--Africa is where we go to feel better about ourselves, to experiment, to show we're good people; no matter the intentions, it's also what we reference in opposition to 'us'.

Plus the site has a smarmy presentation method--you're playing for grains of rice. A graphic literally shows a food bowl filling up as you get each word right (they get progressively harder). It all makes me feel as if I'm throwing pennies at a beggar.

Also, the site syntax is incorrect--for example, it asks: "chomp means:
bite
heartache
kindling
currency"

Well, actually, chomp doesn't "mean" any of the other words--it has a similar meaning to bite, but if chomp meant bite, they wouldn't be two different words.

The economic model for the site is based on ads, of course; but really, like most things tying the West to Africa, the site is run off narcissism.

Uncredited rice field image found online

Reading in

There's a very-typical New Yorker article up, Future Reading. It's got all the wooly-headed prose you'd expect, as well as the sweeping generalizations that sound good and erudite but upon further puzzlement collapse like so much froth, and as always the overiding sense that the article comes as a finely-observed well-chewed dispatch from some alternate universe, so very much like ours but perhaps half a beat behind our messy timestream.

Nevertheless, some nuggets:

Cheap but durable editions like those of Bohn’s Library brought books other than the Bible into working-class households, and newspapers, which in the late nineteenth century sometimes appeared every hour, made breaking news and social commentary available across all social ranks.

Wow... so there are some-- surprisingly major--newspapers which don't update as often as their 19th century brethren!

Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”

The article points to the Online Computer Library Center and its fascinating ">map with details on each country's library system, which leads to this observation:

Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.

Unfiltered Rummy

The Washington Post has a very interesting story out, headlined From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . .

The ex-Defense Secretary's words are almost surreal at times; I can't speak to how representative the quotes are, but they definitely ring true to me, based on Rumsfeld's public persona.

It's almost like he enjoyed being weird and different; there's a self-indulgent academic side to Rumsfeld that I always felt was wrong for his post, no matter how interesting he was.

Someone making literally life and death decisions really shouldn't be coming across as puckish, nor should he be out there relishing his sparring sessions with the press.

The article is a good example of classic reporting--the Post got access to previously-unavailable information, that they then use to more fully explain important past events--even though it's written in an almost casual, blog-like manner.

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.

Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."

There is also this, something which I wish more papers would do:

Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."