Jon Oliver on the Washington football team’s name

Another football season is about to start and we have the Washington DC football team owner continuing to stick with its current deplorable name despite increasing disapproval and the decision by some reporters and media outlets to refuse to use it. I hope that this football team, like my hometown Cleveland Indians whose racist logo is also contemptible, lose every single game or at the least, never make the playoffs. At the moment, the Indians are well on the way to another season of well-deserved mediocrity and I couldn’t be happier.
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Why I don’t expect Meet the Press to change

Now that David Gregory has been fired from his job as host of the NBC Sunday morning talk show, there have been many reasons given for why his show was awful and advice to his successor Chuck Todd on how to turn things around (see here and here). None of them will work because the underlying problem is structural and tinkering with the host and format will not help.
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Style writing guides for spies

While the content of the revelations by Edward Snowden of NSA and CIA spying were disturbing, the poor quality of the internal memos and PowerPoint slides also brought the agencies some ridicule. It turns out that these agencies actually pay quite a bit of attention to style and have produced internal guides on how to write clearly and make good presentations and the style guides have now been released under Freedom of Information requests.
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Why Charles Lewis left 60 Minutes and the corruption of news

Among many news watchers, the venerable CBS News program 60 Minutes is seen as a hard-hitting investigative show. I was never overly impressed with it and never watch it unless I am pointed to a segment for some reason or other. A real investigative reporter Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity that produces some excellent news stories and whose work I have long admired, recounts his own story of being hired as a producer on that show and also working at ABC News.
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Jon Oliver on the events in Ferguson

I have long since ceased to be surprised that some of the best analyses of hot-button issues like what happened in Ferguson is coming from comedy shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and now with newcomer Last Week Tonight. Oliver provides valuable context and background information on what transpired and brilliantly leavens the dark matter with humor.
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Margot Adler

Margot Adler died recently at the age of 68. She was one of the NPR reporters I liked to listen to. She mostly worked on feature items about people and her stories reflected an affinity for those on the margins, the outsiders, those different from the mainstream, trying to understand them and make the rest of us aware of their point of view.
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How PGP works

Since the Edward Snowden revelations a year ago, I have been writing quite a lot about encryption although I don’t know much about it. I came across this introduction to the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system, a common form of what is known as public key cryptography, that was fairly clear about how it worked in converting the plain text message into the encrypted form called the ciphertext.
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