out of New Mexico. This raises an important question: how would a Method Politician govern?
Author: Craig Fehrman
Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.
Professional videogaming
[Gelf]
I first heard about professional videogaming in 2007 — via this article, actually — but haven’t given it much thought since. It might be fun to watch a Kentucky-bred, corn-fed NASCAR fan argue with a Gamestop employee about the true meaning of “athlete,” but the idea of watching videogames doesn’t sound appealing.
Recently, though, I interviewed Michael Kane about his new book Game Boys: Professional Videogaming’s Rise from the Basement to the Big Time , which tries to explain the appeal of team-based games like Counter-Strike. You can find the interview, along with some interesting anecdotes on the reading habits of videogamers, at Gelf.
The Pate White Hope
Right now, Manu Ginobili is probably not interested in my condolences or congratulations. In a game in which he played only five minutes because of an injury, Manu’s Argentinean teammates lost to their American counterparts and that perpetual adolescent we know as Carmelo Anthony. So I’ll forgive Manu if he doesn’t want to hear my hollow sports pieties.
But that won’t stop me from trying. Like many Americans, I had to watch my Olympic basketball online, through a grainy video screen the size of a postcard. Like most Americans—including, for a while at least, our coach Mike Krzyzewski—I’m not very familiar with the basketball players of the world. This combination of ignorance and streaming video poses a problem when the Americans play, say, Spain or Greece. Not so with Argentina. Thanks to Manu’s distinct bald spot, I could track his cuts, rotations, and flops with clarity and ease.
But I don’t want to thank Manu for improving my viewing experience. I want to thank him for providing a perfect metaphor for the Olympic Spirit. Let’s remember that Manu is no innovator: Networks have experimented with similar visual aides, most famously the FoxTrax, a technology that bathed hockey pucks in a pale blue glow. But Manu is all natural.
I don’t mean simply that he’s Rogaine-free. Tom Brady may rely on hair restoration, but then a bald spot wouldn’t do much good since Brady wears a helmet. Brady’s not being vain, he’s being pragmatic. Nevertheless, in an Olympics that, from its anthems to its fireworks, has been marred by artifice and dishonesty, Manu fights back. His baldness is a call to arms: World-class presentation doesn’t have to mean extravagance or deception. When sport is at its best, says Manu’s bald spot, sport can stand alone.
Edit Thy Neighbor
In the August 4 issue of the New Yorker, Ben McGrath tells the story of Alan Rogers, a talented and thoughtful Army lifer who died in Iraq. McGrath’s essay explores whether the military and media intentionally covered up Rogers’s identity as “the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war,” and it makes for fascinating reading. But I was drawn to several lively paragraphs in the middle of McGrath’s essay. There, he describes the “edit war” over Rogers’s posthumous Wikipedia entry, a war fought over phrases like “he was gay and worked to end ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell'” and a picture of Rogers holding hands with another man.
I’ll admit that this conflict forms an arresting image — like a protester whose sandwich boards can dry-erase. But in choosing to focus on it (and this is his only mention of Wikipedia), McGrath follows a recent trend in the coverage of the online encyclopedia — toward overplaying the aggression of its “talk” and “history” pages. This is different than starting with the idea that Wikipedia is flawed or amateur or clumsy. This is brushing aside those ideas to focus on the Wikidrama, ignoring the ends in order to wallow in the means.
Another example of this trend is Eve Fairbanks’s recent essay in the New Republic, on the Wikipedia entries of presidential candidates. Fairbanks’s examples fall into two groups: vandalism (“An editor replaced a photo of Hillary on her Wikipedia page with a picture of a walrus”) and interpretation (“. . . whether to describe Clinton as ‘a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination’ or just ‘a candidate'”). By the end of the essay, though, her emphasis falls on interpretation.
Maybe that’s because vandalism is so 2005. While early critics keyed on Wikipedia’s vandalism, the encyclopedia has slowly found acceptance — not as The Perfect Tool, but as a solid, self-policing source of information. Now, it seems, reporters like McGrath and Fairbanks must turn to the scandal of interpretation.
You’d think institutions like the New Yorker and the New Republic would remain above this kind of sensationalism. Indeed, the entire situation feels strange, a media mashup where two of the toughest places to write for rub elbows with the easiest. Nevertheless, these elite media organs seem more interested in Wikipedia’s interpretations than just about anyone else, even if their goals remain unclear. Perhaps this is related to the innovative WikiScanner, which traces anonymous edits back to their sources. Perhaps it has something to do with the New Yorker’s previous run-in with Wikipedia, the 2006 “Essjay controversy.”
Whatever the cause, I can imagine plenty of effects. Let’s pick two. First, tracking these debates serves roughly the same purpose as using color quotes (which, if you believe Gelf, means they don’t serve any purpose at all). Ultimately, we’re talking about the shock value of online graffiti. Second, and more important, a focus on interpretation can obscure everything Wikipedia has going for it. If you visit Hillary’s entry now, you won’t find anyone arguing whether Clinton is “a leading candidate” or “a candidate” — the way they did in April, when Fairbanks turned in her essay. Because Wikipedia can instantly evolve and self-edit, Hillary is now merely a “former candidate.”
This ability to adapt — to add, say, a new entry when someone like Alan Rogers becomes newsworthy — is a big part of Wikipedia’s value. And twisting this merit into a behind-the-scenes spat is simply a new way to discriminate against Wikipedia —- not for its content, but for its conflict.
Obama’s Ayers Problem
[Gelf]
Nobody knows if/when/how the Republicans will bring up Obama’s tenuous link to Bill Ayers, but that hasn’t stopped everybody from speculating. One thing getting overlooked, though, is The Weather Underground, an Oscar-nominated documentary on Ayers’s days as a ’60s radical. I reconsider the film, and what it might say about the Obama connection and the Obama campaign, in a new essay for Gelf Magazine .
Craig Fehrman 