Seth’s blog

Part 1

Irena Briganti is a widely-feared Fox VP of media relations:

Though one of Briganti’s favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she’ll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of “denied access.”

 Part 2

Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20’s trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academic, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The “experts” that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have.

From Chris Bowers.

Part 3

Yoely made some compromises. He miscalculated, however, when he wired his home with Internet access. “He thought, If I give her this, then she’ll shut up and be satisfied,” Gitty says.

“Once I read blogs from people who had gotten out of places like KJ, there was no turning back. Yoely begged me to stay. It is humiliating for a Satmar man to have his wife leave him. But it was too late,” says Gitty, who would start her own blog, 1 Beautiful Stranger, where she wrote about her misplaced life in Kiryas Joel.

From New York.

I have never read a better description of the difference between being fat and not fat:

I had a gastric bypass and ate 750-1000 calories of liquid meal replacement a day.  I had complications and couldn’t swallow food.  I lost over a hundred pounds.  I regained it over a number of years.  Once I lost weight and was normal–my life did change for the better.  It’s the only reason I had my child.  For the first and only time in my life it was easy to have people in my life.  People wanted to be around me.  I had boyfriends who treated me well for the first and only time in my life.  I got married.  All this happened very quickly and easily with no effort on my part.  Being fat is completely different.  I think the way people treat a fat person is similar to being disfigured or in a wheelchair with your legs cut off .  In many instances it is better to be dead than to be this fat.

From an anonymous blogger who weighs about 280 pounds. She isn’t trying to sell anything, make a journalistic or academic point, appear to be this or that. The post goes on:

My daughter had a fat friend over for a sleep over the other day.  It’s the second fat friend she’s ever had over.  The difference between these girls and the thinner girls is striking.  The fat girls are obsessed with food.  They are more driven to eat, more interested in food, more hungry than the thinner girls.  The thin girls are interested in food far less.  It’s not that they are better than the fat girls, they are simply less hungry.  My daughter first fat friend got up all through the night to raid our refrigerator.  This child acted as if she were starving.  She ate until she was literally ill and threw up on the sleeping bags.  Then later she peed on my daughter.  My daughter is fastidious and she was completely revolted.   That was the end of the friendship.

I came across this because she is trying the Shangri-La Diet.

As I blogged earlier, Tyler Cowen said that on his blog he can say what he really thinks, unlike other economists, who are often unable to say what they really think. Here is another example of the same thing from a blogger who writes about stuttering:

At least four [researchers] have told me that they try not to provoke or openly criticize work by a big name [researcher], because they are scared of having a paper rejected or getting no funding. Actually, they like me because I say what they do not [dare] to say [for] political reasons! So view my blog also as the voices of some in the research community!

This blogger isn’t a researcher so his situation isn’t the same as Tyler’s. But my point is the same: Blogs allow uncomfortable truths to be said that otherwise would not be said.

In the past this was much harder. To say some uncomfortable truth about this or that field of expertise (such as stuttering research or economics), the truth-speaker had to be (a) close enough to the field to understand it (which usually omitted journalists, with a few exceptions, such as Gary Taubes and John Crewdson) and yet (b) outside the field, so as to not suffer professional damage. There was also the problem of publicizing the uncomfortable truth. These requirements were hard to meet. Richard Feynman’s O-ring demonstration was a rare example where they were. Feynman knew what he was talking about yet was outside the industry, so he could say what insiders could not. (His criticism came from insiders.) Saul Sternberg’s and my criticism of Ranjit Chandra is another example. We knew enough about the sort of data Chandra had collected to criticize the work but were outside nutrition so we could say what we wanted to without risking professional harm.

A Philip Weiss example.

BC, AD, and BB. Before blogs, exactly how often could you read something like this — Philip Weiss (a Jewish journalist) criticizing pro-Israel bias among powerful (Jewish) journalists? Exactly never. Illustrating Tyler Cowen’s point that blogging allows him to say what he really thinks.

The Greatness of MondoWeiss.

If I had said to someone twenty years ago, “In twenty years there will be a way for you to say what you really think about everything related to your job, with a big audience” they would have looked at me as if I were crazy. Now, as Tyler Cowen pointed out, that’s actually the case, thanks to blogs. It’s a kind of psychological miracle. It’s due to technology, sure, but the achievement is essentially psychological.

It’s not the only psychological miracle that blogging provides. Consider this account of being in a mental hospital:

K, so since the night I got there, I would get a whiff of this nasty smell. It ’s hard to describe, it was just nasty and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
One day, I’m in my room with two roommates and I smell it.
“There it is again!” I yelled.
“It always smells like this.” The older lady said.
“OmG, you’ve been here so long, you’re used to it,” I said, repulsed. However, I still couldn’t figure out where it came from. Some times I would smell it, then go back to that same place and it would be gone. It was making me (excuse the pun) feel like I was going crazy.
After using the bathroom, I went to wash my hands. Maybe it was the soap? No.
Later, I took a shower and sniffed the shampoo that came out of the pump on the wall.
It was the friggin shampoo! No wonder I got a whiff here and a whiff there. Everyone in the building (32 people) had that crap in their hair!

Vivid, easy to read, even enjoyable to read. Now you know a little — very little, but more than zero — about what it’s like to be in such a place. I read Girl, Interrupted. Lots of movies include scenes in mental hospitals — as stylized as a Dove ad. I didn’t see Titicut Follies. Maybe Sylvia Plath wrote about it, I don’t know. It’s been nearly impossible — or actually impossible — to get an accurate idea of what it’s like to be in a mental hospital without actually visiting one. But now it is.