Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Lets start this week off light with a few fun things I’ve been reading.

The Atlantic points to an adorable story from the Financial Times on the dogs who live in Moscow’s extensive subway system.

From that story:

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Boing Boing ran a series of delightful posts from animation archivist Stephen Worth called “adventures in music.” Worth looks at everything from Booker T and the MGs (see below) to Leonard Bernstein. Great fun.

Finally, personal fave Junot Diaz writes about Obama’s failure to give us a narrative about his presidency.

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

Quiet, relaxed, traditional Garamond seeks attractive serif for flirty, fun, long walks and maybe more. What’s your type(face) quiz by the people at Pentagram. (password is ‘character’)

Illustrator Jessica Hagy has been making these Venn diagrams, tables and charts of various real-world ideas and thoughts. She’s interviewed over at the 99% blog.

From the interview:

There was not a grand plan for world domination via index cards. It was really a mundane set-up: Bored advertising writer reads that “every writer needs a blog” so she steals some office supplies and tosses some ideas into the digital ether, and they’re found and shared.

I actually doodle characters like monsters wearing top hats and dresses or slugs who shoot lasers out of their slimy antennae eyes more than I draw diagrams. The diagrams have become sort of my “thing,” and I like that they have strict confines in which to explore and play. Slugs with weapons: way more open ended.

Over at the Atlantic Wire, Michael Kinsley argues that newspaper articles are too damn long and padded with information. Also, the inverted pyramid is for suckers.

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it. There’s an old joke about the provincial newspaper that reports a nuclear attack on the nation’s largest city under the headline “Local Man Dies in NY Nuclear Holocaust.” Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)

Finally, give your computer desktop or iPhone a New Years makover with one of Kitsune Noir’s wallpapers. This one from Chicago’s Chad Kouri will be gracing my phone soon.